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The company is now producing and shipping a new, more advanced version of its Clariion system, starting with the CX600, as it looks to grab market share from the leader in the midrange storage market Compaq (Hewlett-Packard) and its EVA SAN product, as well as other competitors such as Sun Microsystems and IBM.
According to the company, the new CX600 can process 150,000 transactions per second, which is around 300 percent faster than its previous top-of-the line Clariion device. However, the new devices will also cost around 20 percent more than the firm's earlier line at around USD100,000 for a system with 180 gigabytes and moving up to close to USD1 million for more sophisticated models.
Still the company claimed that its newest product will cost around 15 percent less than comparable devices from its competitors. Additionally, two more new Clariion devices are set to hit the market over the next few months.
Mid to low-end storage computers are capable of holding massive amounts of data, but unlike servers and other high end computers, they are less flexible in the way that data can be manipulated.
The firm said that its newest storage system would be sold through its six resellers, including one of its most significant partners Dell, who will launch a co-branded version of the CX600. "We have pretty high expectations for the CX600," explained Tim McCarthy, Ireland country manager for Dell. "We are also working with EMC to drive the cost out of the product," he added, pointing to Dell's expertise in low cost distribution and its long list of valuable customer contacts.
From Dell's perspective the deal could go a long way to help the Texas-based computer maker reach its goal of doubling total revenue in the next few years. Dell claims that the worldwide storage market is worth nearly USD34 billion and this new line of Clariion products will attend to the larger low-end segment, which is valued at a whopping USD29 billion.
Importantly, the new device, and the relatively low price point that it will sell at, marks a slight change in EMC's strategy as the company generally kept prices as high as the market would allow and has generally been slow to reduce prices. But in the current market EMC, and other storage device makers, have faced tight corporate IT and hardware budgets.
"Bad economic times are not something that anyone wishes," Joel Schwartz, EMC senior vice president and general manager of midrange systems, told ElectricNews.Net. "But we think that there is real demand for the CX600 because customers are looking for good performance at a low price which is what we are offering."
Both Dell and EMC are major employers in Ireland with 5,000 and 1,440 employees respectively. The companies have already sold CX600 storage computers to the likes of Ordnance Survey Ireland and Ryanair, Dell said. All of EMC's international sales of the CX600 will be handled through its Cork facility, which is expected to account for 40 percent of its global sales.
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