EMC Expands Centera Archiving Capabilities to Address Exploding Digital Universe

HOPKINTON, Mass. - March 13, 2008 -

EMC Corporation, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced new software capabilities that double the amount of digital objects its EMC® Centera® content addressed storage (CAS) system can archive, while making it easier to manage and secure the fastest growing areas of what IDC calls the Digital Universe, unchanging electronic content such as medical images, e-mail records, financial documents, video and audio recordings and others.

According to an IDC white paper, sponsored by EMC and released this week –The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth through 2011 – the amount of digital information being created is growing at close to 60 percent annually. The report highlights that the diversity of the digital universe can be seen in the variability of file sizes.  Because of the growth of VoIP (voice over internet protocol), sensors, and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, the number of electronic information “containers” – relatively small files, images, packets, tag contents – is growing 50 percent faster than the number of gigabytes.  The rapid growth in the number of smaller files, most of which are static or unchanging, represents a significant management challenge.

To help businesses and organizations keep up with this growth and securely archive and manage this important information, the newest version of Centera operating software – CentraStar® 4.0 – doubles the amount of objects that each individual disk drive in a system can hold, with each 500 gigabyte or 750 gigabyte drive now able to hold up to 25 million objects.  This is particularly helpful in managing a very large quantity of small objects. In addition, the new version of the software, which is available as a free upgrade, improves the self-management and healing capabilities of Centera systems up to 25 percent faster than previous versions.

“Customer archives are being challenged like never before.  Big files are getting bigger and the quantity of small pieces of information is exploding,” said, Rich Napolitano, Senior Vice President, EMC Storage Division.  “In the past, customers were worried about storing millions of emails, while today we have customers with a billion emails in their archive. With these latest enhancements, we continue to lead the industry in delivering cost-effective production class archiving solutions that keep up with the challenges that customers are facing today.”

In addition to supporting more objects and speedier self-healing, the new version of the CentraStar operating software improves system flexibility and security.  This includes a new capability that enables administrators to segregate, configure and separately manage application, management and replication traffic for the optimal mix of performance and protection.  It also gives administrators additional system logging and auditing capabilities; including the ability to custom configure password complexity rules for enhanced security.

John Worrall, Vice President and General Manager for RSA’s Information and Event Management Group commented,  “This doubling of object count is very helpful to our enVision ™ application users because while each security-related log record they archive is only 500 bytes on average, the sheer quantity of log records that customers collect is in the millions and even billions per day.  While archival of this data is essential to security compliance needs, the growth rate in archived data is much faster than customers expected.”

Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst, Taneja Group, added, “As more data is archived, the challenge to secure and protect that information also increases.  The biggest source of problems comes not from storing and managing large objects but rather from a large number of the tiniest objects you find in today’s environment. Examples abound: instant messages, RFID codes, text messages, small audio and video files, etc. EMC continues to evolve the capabilities of Centera to help keep up with this type of information growth and continues to build in automated capabilities that that help customers manage more archived information without adding additional resources. I am aware of one situation where multiple petabytes are being managed by one administrator.”

With over 4,500 customers and more than 230 petabytes of capacity shipped since its introduction in 2002, EMC Centera is the active archive market leader.  It provides assured authenticity of digital content that can be stored and retrieved at the speed of disk at the price of tape.  Centera is a pioneer in single-instance storage, which saves money by avoiding the storing of numerous copies of the same file, while ensuring access to the single copy.  Additional archiving capacity can be added without disruption and its self management and healing capabilities make it easier for administrators to manage more content.

Availability

CentraStar version 4.0 is currently shipping with all new Centera systems and is available to existing customers under software maintenance free of charge.  Systems running CentraStar 2.4 and above can be upgraded to CentraStar 4.0.