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September 22, 1997

Store Data Fast

Arrays from Digital double speed of past products
By Martin J. Garvey
igital Equipment's StorageWorks division last week announced disk storage arrays that it says double the speed of its previous arrays and compete more effectively at the high end. The new storage devices, aimed at users with servers from Digital or other vendors, are based on UltraSCSI, a faster version of the SCSI bus standard. They range from a low-end array for NT servers to the Enterprise Storage Array (ESA) 10000, which stores from 200 Gbytes to several terabytes of data and delivers it at 56 Mbytes per second.
Digital says the new arrays bring the company up to parity with big storage vendors such as EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Data General's Clariion division. "We scale as high as anyone in the open systems market," says David Coombs, VP of sales and marketing for the $2 billion StorageWorks division.
One analyst agrees that Digital's products now scale to compete with top vendors, some of which have also announced UltraSCSI devices. Still, Digital faces a challenge selling the devices to companies that don't use its Alpha servers. "When customers are deciding on one-box-fits-all, the consolidation of storage from a number of heterogeneous servers, there are lots of players," says Mike Casey, a research director at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "Most customers still want to purchase storage from the server vendor, to avoid finger-pointing."
The new devices deliver their promised performance boost, says one existing StorageWorks user. "We're noticing a twofold improvement in throughput," says Jean-Luc Chatelain, IS manager with Cemax-Imation, a medical imaging vendor in Fremont, Calif. Cemax's system delivers X-ray and CAT-scanned images to health-care organizations, and performance is essential. "When someone is in a car accident, that CAT scan alone will take up 200 Mbytes and travel over a high-speed network for that person to receive the proper care," he says.
Digital announced four storage subsystems. The ESA 10000 is aimed at messaging, Internet, and enterprise applications, as well as data mining; pricing starts at $55,382. The RAID Array 7000 departmental system will store up to 655 Gbytes of data with a transfer rate of 28 Mbytes per second. Prices start at $24,939. The RAID Array 3000 is designed for Windows NT servers. It will store up to 128 Gbytes of data, has a transfer rate of 28 Mbytes per second, and is priced at $7,999. Digital also announced the RAID Array 230/Plus, which starts at $2,420 but lacks the failover and clustering of the other subsystems.
The new subsystems can be upgraded to Fibre Channel connections when faster fibre products arriv e next year, says Coombs. Gartner's Casey says customers should consider fibre upgradability when buying SCSI devices.

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