Dave Donatelli, EVP of platform operations at EMC, told the audience of around 400 analysts, reporters, and customers that the DMX represents the storage industry's first non-blocking architecture. "All we need to do is add more boards; and by adding more boards, we get more bandwidth," he said. "That's really the beauty of the architecture... Everybody gets their own dedicated path."
EMC gets to that 64-Gbyte/s bandwidth figure like this: A fully loaded two-bay DMX 2000 has eight front-end controllers and eight back-end disk controllers. Each one of those has a dedicated connection to the cache controllers in the middle, for a total of 128 connections of 500 MByte/s each.
Initial reaction from analysts has been positive. "It's impressive -- it's a major step forward on bandwidth," says Glen Ingalls, analyst with SoundView Technology Group. "This looks like a system that gives them an edge. I think it will take their competitors one or two years to respond to this, if they choose to do so."
Not everyone is sold on the new matrix architecture. "I'm confused why this matrix architecture is a step forward," says William Bender, infrastructure manager at Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU), which is a large Symmetrix shop. "I think this is about [EMC] keeping costs down."
But EMC insists that the matrix architecture allows it to handily outpace its two main competitors in the high-end space -- Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) -- in real-world applications.
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