EMC Corp will unveil on Monday the largest ever machine for storing corporate data, with up to four times more capacity than is now available. The world's top supplier of corporate data storage wants to stoke growth for its high-capacity systems, betting that huge appetite for data from its biggest customers will defy a trend toward mid-sized boxes, in which users add storage as required.
"Demand is nearly limitless at EMC's biggest customers for ever more massive machines," said Steve Duplissie, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group near Boston.
"There always appears to be somebody who needs these absurdly large boxes."
Target customers are the world's largest companies, Wall Street trading firms, telecoms carriers and government agencies.
EMC said its new Symmetrix DMX-3 is the first corporate machine that can hold more than a petabyte - over a quadrillion bytes of data, or enough to store 2 trillion telephone company transaction records or 250 million digital songs.
In the industry's most anticipated news about new products this year, the Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based company said it would unveil the seventh generation of its high-capacity systems used by big organisations to store reams of corporate data.
"This allows customers to do more while also reducing their costs," said Dave Donatelli, EMC's executive vice president in charge of storage hardware.
International Business Machines Corp and Hitachi Ltd's Hitachi Data Systems unit are EMC's main rivals in the high end of the market for dedicated storage equipment - not including data stored on computers themselves.
Industry research group IDC recently calculated this market can grow to $26.3 billion in 2009 from $22.6 billion last year.
IBM's strategy has focused recently on mid-range systems that allow customers to "pay as they grow", adding storage capacity as business needs demand.
"Less is easier to manage than more," Enterprise Strategy's Duplissie said.
EMC, which itself has enjoyed double-digit growth in the mid-range market, agrees that these systems are selling faster than the single-digit rate of the high-end market.
But the company is confident corporate buyers can use such massive systems to consolidate a variety of smaller storage systems into a central unit, sharply cutting costs.
EMC has shipped more than 10,000 Symmetrix DMX machines since its introduction in February 2003.
The DMX-3, which EMC plans to begin shipping in September, is a single unit made up of hundreds of disk drives wired together with EMC software to form a data storehouse, Donatelli said.
The initial DMX-3 will hold 960 hard disk drives in a unit the size of eight side-by-side refrigerators, roughly double the 576 drives in EMC's current highest-capacity DMX-2.
A new model will hold 1,920 drives in the first half of 2006 and expand to more than 2,000 drives later, Donatelli said.
Another potential market would be the replacement of large amounts of corporate data stored on magnetic tape rather than on hard disks. While this can be handled by lesser machines, EMC believes DMX-3 could cut the overall cost of managing corporate e-mail libraries, databases and other secondary data stores.
Tape archives hold more than double the amount of data as all the hard drives currently in existence, Duplissie said. Forty percent of tape storage is vulnerable to being replaced by far faster storage systems like the DMX-3, he added.
A third driver for the new product is defensive. EMC, IBM and Hitachi compete with each other to win big corporate customers but few customers switch - the DMX-3 helps EMC hold onto its biggest existing customers.
But during the second quarter, when Symmetrix sales were widely expected to slow ahead of this month's new product introduction, they actually grew to $677.7 million, up 4 percent over the first quarter, when sales dipped 1 percent.
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