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The Celerra NX3e isn't it

Just a trial balloon

Curiouser and curiouser, Alice said. The Celerra NX3e is not the new mid-range storage system that EMC CFO David Goulden said would be shipping early next year. But it is an EMC low-end Celerra and has been shipping since October 2009, according to people who should know but prefer to remain anonymous.

Our updated understanding is that the NX3e was an early trial product balloon that was shipped in some parts of the world to check out and test some future technologies - software technologies in particular, we understand. The idea was to check out new ideas in a small-scale production system and refine them, before making a public announcement song-and-dance about them in the real product that will emerge early next year.

The hardware used is old - which explains the use of Fibre Channel instead of SAS drives, the lack of FAST support and, probably, the lack of both Fibre Channel and FCoE host connectivity support.

It was as if EMC was hiding the trial product in plain sight. A search on its web site for "NX3e" gets you a null result but a Google search for "NX3e" gets you quite a lot, some of it in Swedish; there is a Swedish website about the NX3e, calling it the Game Changer.

So we were close but we no cigar. Maybe a roll-up ciggy though; only El Reg can get you news about a semi-secret trial product which is not going to become a real product. As for EMC; you're playing an enjoyably devious game Hopkinton. ®

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