Stepping up its efforts to diversify from the presently very lucrative mainframe disk array market that is inevitably fated to go into a decline, Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corp has added new models of its Symmetrix Integrated Cached Disk Array systems that attach to all major Unix machines, and brought in Oracle Corp, Sybase Inc and Informix Corp to lend moral support. The new, larger Symmetrix 3000 systems are aimed at the data warehousing, decision support, Unix-based transaction processing and other vertical applications that require large databases and rapid access to centrally managed information. Scaling to 1.118Tb, the subsystems offer concurrent multi-host support for HP-UX on HP 9000, AIX on RS/6000 or SP/2, SunOS and Solaris on Sparc, Unix System V.4 on AT&T System 3000 and Nile, Dynix/ptx, Digital Unix, Irix, as well as NetWare, Windows NT and OS/2 on Compaq Computer Corp or IBM Corp servers. List prices for Symmetrix 3000, shipping now, go from $250,000 to $2.588m. On the EMC Centriplex 2000 systems, announced November, now have a new graphical user interface to display configuration, control and status information locally, and the array can now be monitored with an SNMP agent; and it includes EMC’s Remote Maintenance Processor. Also new is first fruit from EMC’s Epoch Inc acquisition: Epoch Data Manager is designed to provide fast database and file system back-up across an open systems enterprise. The Epoch Data Manager provides direct connection to Centriplex and is planned to be extended to Symmetrix 3000.
