EMC Symmetrix

Symmetrix is a disk array for different systems, developed and marketed in the 1980s by EMC. It was a solid state drive, which looked like a hard drive for the CPU and had capacities from 32 to 128 MB.

1992 began marketing the first Symmetrix systems that had the nickname ICDA (Intelligent Cached Disk Array ), since in addition to the plates used the system primarily of intelligent cache (memory) management benefited.

1995, the next milestone as in addition to support for mainframe systems and open systems platforms (UNIX, Windows NT, AS/400 ) were supported in a mixed operating on the same system.

In parallel with the evolution of hardware began the development of software that functions of the hosts took over - among other SRDF ( Symmetrix Remote Data Facility - synchronous data mirroring between multiple Symmetrix systems ) in 1993, TimeFinder ( split mirror mechanism within a Symmetrix system ) in 1997 and many more software products.

In 2005 became available with the Symmetrix DMX -3 ( Direct Matrix Architecture) with a modular design and expandability up to 2400 disks hitherto seventh generation of EMC Symmetrix systems. Hereby a capacity of more than one byte is Peta reachable.

The latest model of the Symmetrix, the Symmetrix VMAX 40K dar. features include support for hybrid clouds and processing of big data records. An engine offers 256GB cache with a maximum limit of 2048GB cache per system. A single Symmetrix VMAX 40K system can include up to eight engines. The system is expandable up to 3200 individual disks and can have " 2.5 hard drives plus 2.8 petabytes " hard drives over a maximum capacity of 4 petabytes 3.5.