EMC Corp. displayed at HIMSS06 last week the world’s largest, fastest, single storage array available with the first-ever one petabyte EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 information storage platform. The DMX-3 now scales both up and down for increased flexibility and is available in a low-end configuration. These platforms provide healthcare providers of all sizes with unmatched consolidation capabilities that allow them to store more patient information at lower cost with easier manageability. Entry-level and high-end configurations of the Symmetrix DMX-3 include new low-cost, fibre channel (LC-FC) 500 GB (gigabyte) disk drives, which enable a single high-end storage array to scale beyond a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) of capacity. New features enable more information from more applications to be stored on single array and multiple tiers of storage to be managed on the Symmetrix DMX-3 platform.

EMC’s new enhancements to the Centera content addressed storage (CAS) include event-based retention and litigation hold software, giving healthcare providers more control over information retention periods to enable stricter adherence to HIPAA compliance or governance requirements. EMC also displayed new file virtualization capabilities that improve the management of information across network attached storage (NAS) environments. The new Rainfinity file virtualization removes the restrictions that individual NAS systems impose, and helps lower costs by enabling better utilization of existing storage system. Virtualization has rapidly become critical for NAS deployments and helps healthcare providers ensure business continuity and protection of data in event of a disaster or unplanned outage.