EarthLink, on the lookout for a different solution that would afford it better performance, decided to take another look at EMC, as well as the latest high-end arrays from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and HDS through its partners Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun.
After an aggressive evaluation process, IBM dropped out of the bidding round on price, leaving only EMC and Hitachi standing, Williams says. In the end, he says, EMC offered more storage capacity and better performance for the money. While Williams won't reveal the dollar sum EarthLink paid for the EMC gear, he insists the company got a good deal.
"EMC, at least from our perspective, had lost the lead to Hitachi in 2000 to 2001, but they've clearly gotten the lead back," Williams says. "They simply have excellent performance." On certain applications, he says, the DMX1000 outperforms HDS Lightning 9960 by a factor of six to one. On big batch jobs, he adds, the DMX offers a 50 percent increase in performance over Hitachi.
In addition to increased performance, Williams says EarthLink liked that fact that EMC has many differently sized boxes to address its different types of data. The ISP also bought EMC ControlCenter (ECC) software to manage all of the gear. As for interoperability with non-EMC systems, he insists that that's not a problem.
"We try to make all of our storage vendors standardize on Brocade Communications Systems Inc., then Brocade deals with the heterogeneous issues," he says. "EMC does an enormous amount of testing with Brocade."
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