Symmetrix was the flagship product that put EMC on the map as the world’s enterprise storage leader in the 1990s and 2000s.
Founded in the 1970s by Richard Egan and Roger Marino – the ‘E’ and ‘M’ of EMC – the company’s growth soared after the development of the array.
The product – led by its vice president Moshe Yanai – was designed for the large-scale, high-tech environments of modern enterprises.
It was particularly popular with the airline industry when it was first introduced, as well as those who were willing to risk deviating from the safety net of IBM’s disk subsystem.
EMC’s first milestone was the introduction of the Symmetrix 4200 Integrated Cache Disk Array in 1990, which had a capacity of 24 gigabytes, and used RAID technology. RAID (redundant arrays of inexpensive disks) used a large number of small, commonly manufactured disk drives, such as the hard drive found in many personal computers.
Five years later saw the arrival of Symmetrix 3000, the world’s first platform-independent storage system, for the open systems market.
Throughout the 1990s, EMC continued to develop further Symmetrix models, which consequently resulted in the company expanding massively – both in size and value.
Symmetrix was at the core of EMC’s fast growing revenue, and the company can still today pride itself as the world’s largest provider of data storage systems by market share.
More recent storage systems under EMC, known as the VMAX generation, are platforms intended for open systems and mainframe computing.
