EMC Corporation has unveiled a highly-flexible, scalable storage area network (SAN) system for small and medium businesses (SMBs) operating in the Middle East and North Africa.

EMC is a global leader in information infrastructure solutions.

'The SAN system is certified with and can easily be deployed, expanded and reconfigured in VMware Infrastructure and traditional IT environments with no application downtime,' said Mohammed Amin, General Manager, EMC Middle East & North Africa.

“SMBs in the Mena region have increasingly become more sophisticated, and EMC’s customers are looking for storage solutions that are reliable, simple to deploy and, most important, make their lives easier,” Amin said.

According to Amin, the EMC Clariion AX4 solution empowers growing companies with the necessary tools to act like storage specialists and to do so with minimal effort and expense.

'Now, EMC’s smaller and mid-sized customers in the region have a fully-functional storage system that is affordable, has the most important software built-in and can be easily managed and scale to meet their future business needs as their information requirements grow,' he added.

The storage system can scale to 60 terabytes of capacity and supports either iSCSI or Fibre Channel (SAN connectivity.

With built-in advanced information management and protection features, it can store, manage, secure and protect data from up to 64 high availability Windows, Linux, Unix, NetWare and VMware Infrastructure hosts simultaneously.

'The CLARiiON AX4 system, with a starting list price of $8,599, is cost-effective to deploy and can easily be tailored and expanded to meet dynamic information storage requirements and is ideally suited for applications including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Oracle and SAP. It can be configured with up to 60 SAS and SATA disk drives for an optimal mix of performance, cost and energy efficiency,' Amin observed.

The system was specifically designed to integrate with and extend key VMware Infrastructure capabilities, many of which require shared storage. 

Built-in features enable real-time volume expansion – making the allocation of high performance storage for new virtual machines simple and seamless. 

“Companies, especially SMBs, are constantly looking for ways to simplify their IT environments and get the most value from their storage investments,” said Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT, Inc. 

“That’s one of the key reasons why iSCSI is becoming so popular, and is especially important in VMware environments where new virtual servers require consolidated storage.-TradeArabia News Service