Jan 18, 2011 10:51 GMT  ·  By

With all the growing needs for virtualization and centralized storage, EMC decided it was time to deliver its newest suite of unified storage systems, dubbed VNXe and intended for IT managers that do not specialize in storage.

The new VNXe series from EMC is made for small and medium businesses.

It is meant to be simple and affordable, perfect for small and medium businesses, while allowing single-click help and support, besides application-optimized management.

It has 2U or 3U compact packaging, inside which lie high-performance 6 Gbps SAS and Nearline SAS drives, which are known for their high capacity support.

Up to 120 disk drives can be placed inside them, meaning that the top storage capacity one can reach is 240 TB.

To this massive capacity are added built-in data protection and replication, support for file-based and block-based storage, self-help and support infrastructure and even efficiency features, like file deduplication and compression, plus thin provisioning.

What's more, they come with no single-point-of-failure design and compatibility with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Hyper-V.

"This is the most significant midrange announcement in EMC's 30-year history. It is a critical piece of EMC's strategy of architecting our storage solutions to be optimized for virtualized environments," said Rich Napolitano, President, Unified Storage Division at EMC.

"The VNX family sets the stage for all of our future products in EMC's midrange portfolio. For storage specialists, we've converged the best attributes of the market leading SAN (with EMC CLARiiON) and NAS (with EMC Celerra) storage systems into one powerful new platform—armed with the industry's most advanced automated tiering software to exploit the benefits of SSDs,” he added.

“For IT generalists, EMC brings tremendous simplicity and enterprise-class storage to SMBs—affordably," Napolitano concluded.

The entry price of the VNX3 series is $10,000 and orders should already be possible.