EMC World: VMAX Boxes Get Pumped With 4 Petabyte Power

EMC has done what it does best in souping up its storage boxes, producing three fresh models for its VMAX line-up, including one box that can offer 4PB usable capacity.

The VMAX 10K (which is an update to the entry-level VMAXe array), VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K were announced at EMC World today, as the storage giant looks to establish itself as the industry pacesetter, whilst selling the kit as ideal for hybrid cloud deployments.

EMC claimed the high-end 40K model offered businesses three times better performance, twice the usable capacity and twice the total IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) of any other enterprise storage product. It runs on 2.8GHz Intel Xeon 6-core processors, otherwise known as Westmere chips, with 24 CPU cores and PCIe Gen2 for that added speed.

The 40K’s 4PB of usable capacity is twice that of the 20K and almost three times the 1.5PB usable capacity of the VMAX 10K.

Greener option?

There are two options for how IT teams can pack their VMAX 40K monsters. There’s a ‘High Density’ option for the VMAX 40K, which will appeal to those attracted by its green credentials. In that model, 2.5-inch SAS drives are used instead of 3.5-inch drives to offer three times less power than the standard configuration.

“The 40K is in a class by itself… This is perfect for big data analytical workloads,” said Brian Gallagher, president of EMC’s enterprise storage division.

There’s Flash capability in the 40K too, with new 2.5-inch eMLC (Multi-Level Cell) Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) to help build out FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) configurations “that cost-effectively utilise more Flash”.

Opening up

Being more open with interoperability is a message EMC is trying hard to drive home at its premier event, and it’s done so via its software additions today too.

New Federated Tiered Storage (FTS) capabilities, which allows for data mobility between in-house and external arrays either from EMC or third parties, check up on data across different boxes to “protect against silent data corruption”. FTS uses VLUN migration technology and is based on some fresh Enginuity emulation functionality, known as DX (Disk Adaptor eXternal).

“All these capabilties can be run on VMAX systems that customers bought back in 2009 – this is what i call investment protection,” Gallagher added.

Using FTS and FAST VP, IT departments can integrate other vendors’ storage arrays without much interruption to business continuity, according to EMC. The storage giant is essentially saying IT can easily integrate competitors’ storage infrastructure, as well as its older machines, meaning moving to EMC high-end kit is easy.

EMC RecoverPoint is another part of this strategy, offering local and remote replication of EMC VMAX with “point-in-time recovery”, allowing replication to and from heterogeneous storage systems, the vendor said.

Connecting all this up is a fresh version of the VMAX OS, Enginuity, which supports older VMAX boxes too. Enginuity version 5876 features the Unisphere management interface, designed to provide “a common look and experience across the entire EMC VMAX Family as well as EMC VNX Family, EMC VPLEX and RecoverPoint products.”

All the boxes are based on the Virtual Matrix Architecture introduced in 2009, designed to bring massive scalability with the ability to manage storage for hundreds of thousands of VMs.

The three new boxes are shipping from today.

Going hybrid

Alongside big data, EMC will be taking the boxes to market with another one of the big buzz phrases of the IT world: hybrid cloud. The boxes and the software in them should help companies ship data fast, regardless of the make and model of kit, EMC believes.

Furthermore, Gallagher said the vendor wanted to “dissolve the distance between the data centre and the service provider”. He claimed most companies were still looking at the hybrid model rather than the public cloud.

“No CIO in mid to large enterprise is considering a Google or Amazon for infrastructure… There’s that trust factor,” he added. “We want to give the CIO a joystick – to have flexibitly of choice and reload and application literally within minutes.”

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