Fujitsu Redefines Storage, Puts Business Priorities Ahead with New Generation ETERNUS DX Disk Systems

Fujitsu today introduces a new era of business-centric storage, with new-generation ETERNUS DX systems that are the industry’s first to put business priorities ahead of storage, easing IT challenges such as the management of ever increasing volumes of critical data. This announcement is made at Fujitsu Forum 2013, Europe’s biggest single-vendor IT event. With its new-generation ETERNUS DX S3 disk storage arrays and latest release of the ETERNUS SF V16 system management software, Fujitsu is delivering business-centric systems that are completely flexible and adaptable to users’ business priorities, instead of allowing the technology to rule over its users.

New ETERNUS DX disk systems enable storage professionals to seamlessly adapt to the needs of their users, and deliver better service levels at lower costs. These benefits are a result of a combination of advances, including a fivefold improvement in performance and intelligent data priority management, meaning that the systems themselves are able to shape backup according to business priorities. Across the range, the scalable entry-level ETERNUS DX100 S3 and DX200 S3 models and the midrange ETERNUS DX500 S3 and DX600 S3 models provide unmatched support for data consolidation projects thanks to seamlessly integrated unified NAS and SAN connectivity.

For the first time, Fujitsu is enabling storage professionals to boost system utilization up to 90 percent, breaking with conventional storage wisdom that system capacity should not exceed 50 percent to avoid slow system response times.

Combining significantly increased performance with business-centric, automated quality-of service management, the new Fujitsu ETERNUS DX systems also deliver industry-leading performance, running at five times the IOPS, three times the bandwidth and double the bus performance of previous models. The entire ETERNUS DX line-up is based on the latest Intel multicore processors, featuring optimized multiprocessing and threading capabilities, bigger caches and additional flash caches, the latest SAS3 drive interfaces and 16 GB Fibre Channel connectivity.

A new automated quality of service management means that storage professionals no longer need to perform complex and costly tuning to set required response time for high-priority applications. This increases operational efficiency and enables storage professionals to more easily maintain critical service levels.

All new ETERNUS DX systems can be configured as unified storage systems with seamless integrated block and file, and SAN and NAS capabilities. In a major difference from simple gateway architectures, this unified functionality is seamlessly integrated within storage controllers, resulting in a consistent user experience, and providing the ability to share all high availability and failover functionalities for SAN and NAS operations across storage controllers.

Fujitsu is also publishing a roadmap confirming upgrades that will introduce further new functionality as well as boosting performance, efficiency, utilization and business continuity capabilities. Enhancements include the transparent failover of ETERNUS DX systems across model classes, dramatically accelerated data rebuild for failed disks, better disk utilization through data compression and deduplication and the introduction of InfiniBand connectivity.

All ETERNUS DX S3 systems are easier to manage and share the same flexible family architecture, providing investment protection and offering extensive scalability, thanks to the ability to seamlessly upgrade to bigger models within the range. In addition, the latest release of ETERNUS SF software introduces new system management functionality for customers with current Fujitsu ETERNUS DX S2 systems.

Rachel Dines and Stephanie Balaouras, Research Analysts at Forrester Research, in the Forrester report, Build The Always-On, Always-Available Extended Enterprise (8/12)
“In today's world of 24x7x365 global operations and competition, downtime results not only in immediate lost revenue and productivity, but also in lasting damage to corporate reputation that erodes customer confidence in your brand. Enterprises today must be always on and always available to an extended network of customers, employees, and partners.”

Hiroaki Kondo, Corporate Vice President and Head of Storage Systems Business Unit, Fujitsu Limited
“With the new ETERNUS family, Fujitsu demonstrates a customer-centric philosophy with new business-centric storage, with fresh thinking that not only delivers enormous improvements in system utilization but also the industry’s most flexible systems that adapt to users’ business priorities.”

The full line-up of ETERNUS DX S3 systems and ETERNUS SF16 management software are generally available from December 16, 2013.