EMC Divergence - price, capacity, etc.
* My company bought an EMC Symmetrix 3500 this summer.
* Capacity is 1 terabyte - ours is about half full.
* Cache up to 4 Gb - we have 1 Gb.
* Cache makes writes "instantaneous", faster than reads. In case of crash or power failure, a builtin UPS allows it to flush the writes to disk.
* Multiplexed everything, fully configurable - no single point of failure, whether it is a disk, SCSI channel, controller, etc. Hook up the modem and it calls EMC support for you. They usually know you have a problem before you do.
* Obviously how full it is and how it is configured has a lot to do with how much it costs - ours was in the high six figures.
* Don't have performance/thruput figures at the tip of my tongue, but I have seen a 3-5x increase in thruput for large write intensive operations over the old setup, which was a bunch of 2Gb HP disk drives.
I don't own EMC stock, although I think it is a good company to own. I do watch it, and may buy on a significant dip. I have committed my largest percentage to Ampex, and plan to buy more. I bought last month at 6-5/8 and this week at 9.5.
Hope I haven't over-estimated your curiosity.
Cheers,
Ted |
