Celerra gets de-dupe, virtualisation plugins

EMC has refreshed its Celerra line, adding support for solid state disks and low-power SATA II drives, plus the chance to plug in different network interfaces.

The biggest new addition, cut for the cloth of the industry's 'do more with less' mantra is data deduplication, which is now available as a single-button option on the devices.

EMC Australia's Clive Gold said the deduplication technologies on offer include Avamar and RecoverPoint, both of which are integrated into Celerra Manager.

Compression has also been added and in combination with deduplication can, Gold said, deliver 50% disk space savings.

The two functions are both offered in all new Celerra machines,but will also be made available at no charge to current Celerra users, who will need to download and install the tools.

Another innovation is the addition of technology previously found only in EMC's Clariion line that sees network interfaces become interchangeable on Celerra devices, which can operate simultaneously with fiber channel and iSCSI interfaces to different servers. Gold says migrating this ability to Celerra readies it for forthcoming networking technologies including fiber channel over ethernet and 8G fiber channel.

The company has also added new tie-ins to VMware, with a new pug-in to VMware vCenter making it possible for Celerra devices that have been failed over into a virtualised environment to be restored to the Celerra.

The new models are dubbbed the Celerra NS-120, NS-480, NS-960 and NS-G8 and will be available in early March 2009.