EMC Keeps Driving Down Storage Costs

Storage has to keep getting cheaper and cheaper while doing things better at the same time. EMC Corp. will continue to do its part Wednesday by unveiling the CX400 storage system that will fit into its midrange Clariion line.

The CX400 has something going for it that has been part of no other EMC system--it's based on low-cost ATA drives that makes the list price about a penny per megabyte. This comes from the vendor that got 55 cents for each megabyte just a few years ago, but this system isn't meant to compete with the new, high-end DMX system that goes for 6 cents per megabyte. The CX400 is also supposed to play in the near-line storage space, an area in which DMX will never show up.

In the near-line space, data doesn't get from server to storage as fast as it does from high-end storage systems based on better-performing, if more expensive, drives. Such storage is usually used in the backup and recovery space, and an ATA-based system such as the CX400 is meant to be an interim system, for much quicker access, than the tape storage that currently dominates backup and recovery because customers get many megabytes of storage for each penny. EMC hopes the CX400, which is priced around $171,000 for 10 terabytes of capacity, will entice customers to beef up their backup and recovery processes. They should be able to recover data much quicker than with tape.

"More and more people are interested in instant recovery nightly and maybe vaulting the data on tape weekly," says Mark Lewis, EMC's chief technology officer. His boss, Joe Tucci, EMC's president and CEO, expects the CX400 to extend the way online storage is used. "We expect to change backup and recovery in 2003," Tucci predicts.

Yankee Group analyst Jamie Gruener says the CX400 is another sign that storage is becoming a commodity market. "EMC is trying to cater to other segments of the market," he says. "This really lowers the cost for backup and recovery."