EMC Celerra Highroad Named "Storage Product of the Year" by Infoworld Magazine; Ground-Breaking Software Receives 37% of the Vote in Annual Readers' Choice Awards.

Business/Technology Editors

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2001

Underscoring the sweeping industry trend toward the networking of storage, the readers of InfoWorld Magazine have honored EMC Celerra HighRoad software as the industry's Storage Product of the Year. Known as the technology that effectively ended the debate between Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN) by combining the best of both environments, Celerra HighRoad software was nominated by InfoWorld editors, writers, and analysts for the award.

"InfoWorld readers are known for their technological acumen, and subsequently the results of the voting are very revealing," said Owen Linderholm, Features Editor for InfoWorld. "When InfoWorld editors looked over the results, they were pleased to see how much close attention our readers had paid to the news of the past year and the business climate in making their decisions, while remaining very clear and concrete about the value of the best technological solutions."

Introduced in December of 2000, Celerra HighRoad software pioneered the approach known as Multi-Path File Sharing (MPFS), which which utilizes the strengths of both the industry-standard file sharing of network attached storage (NAS) and the high-performance information delivery of a storage area network (SAN). Leveraging the best attributes of NAS and SAN, Celerra HighRoad intelligently and automatically determines the optimal route for data delivery within a networked information storage environment, an approach that sets the stage for the future of information storage.

"Celerra HighRoad blurs the traditional lines between NAS and SAN - yet leverages the strong points of each -- by dynamically and transparently moving information from where it is to where it needs to be, regardless of connectivity, distance, or format," said Chuck Hollis, EMC's Vice President of Products and Markets. "Companies want to deliver new products, services, and business models without having to modify their existing applications or infrastructure. Celerra HighRoad not only does this, but also provides a quantum change in the performance and scalability of networked file sharing -- enabling companies to utilize their information in new and innovative ways."

Also referred to as "network request, channel delivery," this approach increases performance by using separate mechanisms for control actions and file delivery, yet places all the technical details behind the scenes, transparent to the user. Applications request information from EMC's Celerra File Server (e.g., "Please send me the billing records from last month") over the traditional IP network. HighRoad software determines the best "path" for data delivery, and will either deliver small files back through the network, or instruct the EMC Symmetrix(R) Enterprise Storage system to reply by delivering information (all the billing records from last month) directly to the application over the high-performance Fibre Channel SAN.

As a result, customers benefit from shared data access at channel speeds, reduced network traffic and improved performance for applications that require many host servers to share access to very large data files. Additionally, because large files are no longer transmitted on the network, the number of supported hosts can be increased significantly.

Customers using Celerra HighRoad in production environments have measured large performance improvements in network file sharing capabilities, especially in high-bandwidth collaborative and publishing applications, such as medical image processors and video streaming applications.

KORE, an engineering and consulting company that focuses on the media and entertainment markets, uses Celerra HighRoad to cut transfer times for its large video files. In a recent report by IDC, KORE's CTO Alan Eiler described the benefits of using the HighRoad technology: "If we are talking about applications that are moving large-volume files, such as an encoding or any digital asset store, the larger the file, the better the performance characteristics get for us. Our transfer times with HighRoad are, at a minimum, half that of traditional storage."

Other types of applications that benefit from the deployment of HighRoad include image processing, simulation or modeling applications, or any application requiring shared network-attached access by many clients to a single pool of information.

Celerra HighRoad is a multi-path file system (MPFS) software and is part of the Celerra DART (Data Access in Real Time) file server and corresponding client software, installable on supported hosts. Utilizing an EMC Celerra File Server, a Symmetrix Enterprise Storage System, host client software and both Local Area Network (LAN) and Storage Area Network (SAN) connectivity, Celerra HighRoad software can operate in UNIX or NT environments.

About EMC 

EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.EMC.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and Celerra, and HighRoad are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.