EMC Introduces New Lower Cost EMC Celerra NAS Systems with iSCSI Support

Hopkinton, - August 30, 2004 -

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, is continuing to make networked storage more flexible and affordable for a wider range of customers by announcing new, lower-cost models of EMC Celerra network attached storage (NAS) systems, improved application connectivity via iSCSI and enhanced management capabilities. Today's announcement, EMC's third major NAS advancement in 2004, further extends the industry's broadest NAS product family and continues supporting customer preferences for flexible, gateway-based NAS deployments.

The affordable, new Celerra NS500 system, available in an integrated or gateway configuration, is a cost-effective entry point into the advanced and robust Celerra NAS family. Industry standard benchmarks show it offers better performance and better price/performance than similarly configured competitive systems. Additionally, the new Celerra NS704G NAS gateway now delivers industry-leading availability and performance for mid-tier NAS requirements. These gateway models let customers leverage investments in existing storage area networks (SANs) and are the most cost-effective way for customers to deploy NAS.

EMC is also announcing a new version of its DART operating environment, including enhancements to the Celerra Manager Basic Edition and iSCSI support. With iSCSI support, Celerra now offers an "all-in-one" storage solution that allows customers to consolidate both storage and servers into a single, centrally managed platform. This capability gives customers the ability to lower costs by leveraging investments made in existing networks.

New features include a graphically displayed "at-a-glance" status-monitoring capability that improves ease of use by helping administrators quickly identify potential system or performance issues. The "at-a-glance" screen displays memory and CPU usage, performance and throughput information, the number of active network connections, information about open files, storage utilization and more. Additionally, through integration with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS), users can now perform file-level restores using MS Explorer's "previous versions" property tab. This capability can lower customers' support costs by enabling users to recover their own files.

Smith Anderson, a full-service law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, chose EMC's NAS gateway technology coupled with an EMC CLARiiON SAN, over Network Appliance, to serve files to a team of nearly 100 attorneys.

Lorie Beam, Smith Anderson's Director of Information Technology, said, "There are not many products that combine the advanced NAS and SAN features we need and are affordable for a firm of our size. EMC's Celerra NAS gateway turned out to be the perfect fit. Now that our legal staff has faster access to critical documents and applications, we're more productive and are delivering more responsive client service. We gain the benefits of a SAN without having to buy Fibre switches. We're lowering management costs through server and storage consolidation and the product's automatic monitoring and troubleshooting. We also like that we purchased the product from EMC—a financially stable vendor with a reputation for exceptional customer support."

"EMC has done a great job expanding their NAS product line," said Tony Asaro, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The combination of their EMC Celerra NS704G NAS gateway, the low-end NS500, iSCSI support and an easy-to-use management GUI gives customers a compelling set of solutions from EMC, a leading storage vendor that offers world-class support. It isn't just one offering but a product family that can address the requirements of different customers and environments. EMC is listening to their customers and responding to the needs of the market."

Details on EMC's new NAS models include:

• Celerra NS500 A New, Low-Cost NAS Platform
  The Celerra NS500 system, available in gateway and integrated models, delivers superior mid-tier price/performance, integrated high-availability and flexible configuration options to match a wide range of service levels and price points. It is available with either one or two data movers. This product extends EMC NAS technology to new customers, yet offers investment protection as it can be up upgraded to a higher-performing Celerra NS700/704G. With the Celerra NS500 EMC is delivering superior value to customers over its competitors.
• The Celerra NS500 in a single data mover configuration delivers performance that exceeds that of a Network Appliance FAS960 at a price that's 24% lower than the FAS270.

The Celerra NS500 is available immediately with a list price of $40,000 for a 1TB, single data mover, integrated configuration, with CIFS and SnapSure.

• Celerra NS704G Gateway NAS Industry Leading Availability and Performance
  The Celerra NS704G provides Celerra NS500G/NS600G/NS700G customers with a simple, cost-effective upgrade path to increased performance and advanced clustering capability. The Celerra NS704G is available with four data movers and supports both single and dual Control Station configurations. The Celerra NS704G delivers industry-leading performance of more than 100,000 NFS operations per second and brings unique availability characteristics to the mid-tier.

A Celerra NS704G four-data-mover configuration delivers the following performance:

• 65% better price/performance than the Network Appliance GF960C at a 30% lower price
• 68% better price/performance, than the IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 four-way cluster at a 53% lower price

The Celerra NS704G is available immediately with a list price of $165,000 for a four- data-mover configuration with CIFS and SnapSure.

David Donatelli, EMC Executive Vice President of Storage Platform Operations, said, "EMC's innovation and leadership in NAS gateway technology is providing customers with solutions that are easy-to-manage-and-deploy and help make their businesses run smoother and more efficiently. These new products further demonstrate EMC's commitment to delivering cost-effective and flexible network storage solutions to help tackle our customers' most critical business needs."

About EMC

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.EMC.com.