The company announced its largest and fastest storage solution on Monday, the Symmetrix DMX-3.
Through scaling, EMC said in a press release the DMX-3 storage array can retain up to one petabyte of data. That would be the equivalent of 250 million digital songs.
The lower cost of disk drives has contributed to the development of the DMX-3 system. EMC claims its greater internal bandwidth and new memory technology will let users replace existing platforms with the system.
Additional drives can be added to the array, in what EMC describes as pay-as-you-go economics. Today, the system can support up to 960 drives. That figure will increase to 1,920 in 2006, and then to 2,000 later that year.
Those supported drives will include low-cost Fibre Channel disk drives. Fibre Channel technology was developed to deliver SCSI traffic from servers to disk arrays, and to do so more quickly than other technologies.
EMC expects the DMX-3 to begin shipping in September, with low-cost FC drives becoming available in early 2006.
