New EMC Celerra NX4

With a flexible design enabling it to be deployed in NAS (network attached storage), iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN (storage area network) environments, and offering advanced functionality at no extra charge, the Celerra NX4, claims the company, is the most cost-effective entry-level unified storage platform available on the market today.

The Celerra NX4 is said to be ideally suited for small to medium-sized businesses and remote offices looking to consolidate distributed file servers and storage onto a single, easy to use platform. With EMC’s Celerra Startup Assistant software, the Celerra NX4 can be powered up and configured in as little as 15 minutes. The centralized web-based Celerra Manager software makes system administration simple and intuitive with easy to use wizards and automated volume management, enabling administrators to provision a file system in just four mouse clicks. Celerra thin provisioning dramatically simplifies storage management and improves storage efficiency, combining virtualization of storage to hosts and users along with advanced automated safeguards. Celerra SnapSure software allows for instant data protection while consuming minimal storage space, providing read-only and read-writable logical point-in-time copies of data that can be leveraged for user-driven data recovery and online backups.

“EMC’s expertise in IP storage continues to yield the most cost-effective, reliable, and easy to use unified storage systems in the industry, fueling over fifty percent year-over-year revenue growth for our Celerra product line in the first half of 2008,” said Mohammed Amin, Regional Manager, EMC Middle East & North West Africa. “The Celerra NX4 extends the Celerra family’s legacy of value, performance and high availability to a new market, ensuring that customers of all sizes can benefit from advanced features and management agility without straining their budgets. No other system in its class offers the built-in functionality and flexibility delivered with the Celerra NX4.”

The Celerra NX4 supports Microsoft, Unix, Linux and VMware ESX Server operating environments and major applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and VMware Site Recovery Manager, with proven reference architectures to speed deployment. Supporting up to 60 terabytes of capacity and configurable with up to 60 high-capacity SATA disk drives and/or high-performance SAS drives, the Celerra NX4 enables storage tiering based on availability, cost, and energy efficiency considerations while delivering industry-leading price/performance.