EMC's RAID-S attains an industry first with RAID advisory board conformance

Unique RAID-S implementation is first mainframe/opensystems feature to receive RAID Level 5 Conformance certification

HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 11, 1995--EMC Corporation's RAID-S data protection feature has been granted the RAID Advisory Board's RAID Level 5 Conformance certification. RAID-Sis implemented across EMC's complete range of Symmetrix Integrated Cached Disk Array (ICDA) systems for mainframes, open systems and a combination of the two. It is the industry's first data protection technique that can be used for both mainframe and open systems to receive the RAID Advisory Board's RAID Level 5 conformance certification.

As a result of today's announcement, EMC's Symmetrix systems now conform to RAID Advisory Board RAID Level 1 (mirroring), Level 4 and Level 5. EMC's unique RAID-S parity-based data protection feature providesmainframe and open systems users with a combination of high availability, high performance and higher usable storage capacity for RAID-protected data. In addition to its data protection qualifications, as evidenced by the RAB certification, RAID-S utilizes EMC's advanced software, hardware and data mapping to overcome the performance shortcomings generally associated with traditional RAID offerings.

"RAID-S provides customers with significant performance advantages over all other vendors' RAID implementations," said Richard Blaschke, EMC's Vice President of Enterprise Systems. "Because RAID-S parity calculations are performed at the disk level -- as opposed to the controller, drawer, or host levels -- performance is significantly improved by off-loading commands and freeing the controller to process I/O requests from the host." In addition to performance advantages, EMC's "scalable availability" provides customers the flexibility to implement a combination of data protection options -- including mirroring (RAID 1), Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and RAID-S -- within the same Symmetrix system. This unmatched level of flexibility enables customers to take advantage of the best balance between performance and data protection based on the unique needs of different sets of data.

The RAID Advisory Board is an association of suppliers and consumers of RAID-related products and other organizations with an interest in RAID technology. RAB's goal is to foster an orderly development of RAID technology and introduction of RAID-related products into the marketplace.

EMC Corporation, based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is a world leader in enterprise-wide information storage and retrieval technology, designing systems for mainframe, midrange and open systems environments. The company has offices worldwide and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC. For additional copies of this release or further information about EMC products and services, EMC's home page is at http://www.emc.com.