New EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture Beginning With the Symmetrix V-Max

EMC Corporation (www.emc.com) unveiled a new approach to high-end data storage with an innovative new architecture purpose-built to support virtual data centers. EMC also announced the first storage system based on this architecture, which will serve as a cornerstone of virtual computing infrastructures that are transforming the technology landscape.

The new EMC Virtual Matrix Architecture integrates industry-standard components with unique EMC Symmetrix capabilities to deliver massive scalability – enabling systems that scale to hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second) supporting hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure. It is the first storage architecture that combines the performance and efficiency of a scale-up architecture and the cost-effective flexibility of a scale-out architecture. It was designed and built from the ground up to break the physical boundaries of data center storage, incorporates automation to simplify storage management, enables resources to be scaled on demand and uses less energy per terabyte of data stored than traditional high-end storage systems.

The first storage system based on this innovative new architecture is the EMC Symmetrix V-Max system, which is available immediately. It is the world’s largest high-end storage array and uses multi-core processors to lower power costs and improve IOPS per dollar. Combined with the latest generation Enterprise Flash, Fibre Channel and SATA drives, the Symmetrix V-Max system allows users to cost effectively meet the widest range of storage requirements for high performance and high capacity in a single system. It joins the market-leading EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 system and expands EMC’s high-end portfolio. Together they represent the two newest high-end storage architectures on the market today.

The high-availability Symmetrix V-Max Engine at the center of the new system is a flexible building block that features multiple redundant Quad-core Intel Xeon processors with up to 128 GB (gigabytes) of memory and up to 16 host and 16 drive channel connections. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows Symmetrix V-Max Engines to interconnect and share resources. This enables a Symmetrix V-Max system to scale to 1024 GB (gigabytes) of global memory, with twice as many front-end and back-end connections compared to the industry-leading Symmetrix DMX-4 systems. The ability to interconnect and share resources to easily and linearly scale out is a key customer requirement as virtual machines and applications are dynamically added and shifted.

"The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore," said Joe Tucci, EMC Chairman, President and CEO. "Virtualization’s ability to maximize resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening in the storage world. EMC is leading the way with the biggest breakthrough in new high-end storage design in nearly two decades, enabling storage customers to deploy a flexible, dynamic, energy-efficient information infrastructure and get the maximum value for their investment."

The Symmetrix V-Max system provides more than three times the performance, twice the connectivity and three times more usable capacity than Symmetrix DMX-4 systems and uses significantly less power per terabyte and per IOP. As part of EMC’s Early Adopter Program, more than 30 of the new systems have already been shipped to customers with some of the world’s largest data centers, including EMC’s own state-of-the-art production data center.

Claudio Baffigi, Head of Technological Infrastructures at UniCredit Group, one of Europe’s leading banks, beta-tested the new Symmetrix V-Max system, and said, "A storage infrastructure that can help improve database performance and maintain that high performance during peak workloads is one of our major requirements because it enables us to better serve our customers in 22 countries. The Symmetrix V-Max system can significantly improve response times on our production database, which translates to improved productivity for our 10,200 branches. The scalability and provisioning capabilities of the Virtual Matrix architecture were easy to understand and use and will allow us to get the maximum performance and capacity for our storage investment. In addition, the Symmetrix V-Max system also fits in well with our green initiative to reduce energy consumption and eliminate unnecessary hardware."

New Automated Management Tools
In virtualized environments, there are significant benefits to consistent and rapid provisioning of storage to multiple physical servers and server clusters. The Symmetrix V-Max system automates storage provisioning, reducing the time and complexity of provisioning by 95 percent. Integration with numerous VMware features enables both server and storage resources to be provisioned on demand, with centralized management, reporting and control. In addition, EMC ControlCenter support for both the Symmetrix V-Max storage system and VMware will increase visibility and automate reporting across the virtual server and storage environments.

In tiered storage environments, Symmetrix V-Max systems enable data to be non-disruptively relocated to different storage tiers and RAID protections, including ultra- high performing Enterprise Flash Drives, traditional Fibre Channel disk drives and high-capacity SATA disk drives based on business requirements. The Virtual Matrix Architecture allows customers to relocate more data in less time and with less impact to overall performance than any competitor, while also maintaining local and remote replication activities to ensure continuous protection for today’s ’24 by forever’ data centers.

Microsoft adCenter, a part of Microsoft Advertising, is a tool that helps advertisers manage their search advertising campaigns on Microsoft Live Search. adCenter also recently beta tested the new Symmetrix V-Max systems. "Our advanced capabilities enable advertisers to target their ads to the right consumers and maximize effectiveness," said Bong Kang, SAN engineering lead, Microsoft adCenter. "Our infrastructure uses EMC Symmetrix systems and software to more rapidly analyze information. The new Symmetrix V-Max systems have the ability to easily move data from the highest-performing media to lower-performing drives based on how the information is being used. The ability to scale performance along with capacity is a key capability as our business continues to grow."

EMC also announced Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), its innovative automation technology. Leveraging the Virtual Matrix Architecture’s unprecedented data relocation capabilities, FAST will automate the movement of data across multiple storage tiers based upon business policies, predictive models and real-time access patterns. This will further accelerate the adoption of Enterprise Flash Drives by enabling customers to more effectively leverage Flash performance together with the cost-effective capacities of SATA hard drives for improved return on investment and lower total cost of ownership. This new technology will be available on Symmetrix V-Max systems later this year.

Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst, The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., said, "Server virtualization has caught fire, and there is no turning back. To realize the ultimate benefit, however, the whole infrastructure stack has to be virtualized and integrated. EMC’s new Virtual Matrix Architecture provides all the missing ingredients required for the virtual data center at the high-end storage layer – infinite effective scale in all dimensions, a single system image to manage and dynamic self-optimization."

Industry Leading CEOs on the Virtualized Data Center
John Chambers, chairman and CEO for Cisco, said: "Cisco and EMC share a vision of next-generation data center solutions that allow our customers to unleash the full power of virtualization and transform the traditional data center. There is a market transition occurring within the data center, and EMC’s new approach to high-end storage virtualization complements Cisco’s Unified Computing architecture, enabling customers to increase productivity, improve business agility and take the benefits of virtualization to a whole new level."

Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, said: "Companies of all sizes began on a path toward virtualization for the immediate cost savings from using servers more efficiently. Through this journey, customers also found that their datacenters became more flexible as infrastructure elements are pooled and available on demand. The new Symmetrix V-Max System in combination with VMware’s upcoming vSphere generation of products currently in development will extend this value by yielding customers not just CapEx savings but OpEx savings through increased efficiency, control and choice."

Paul Otellini, Intel president and chief executive officer, said: "Intel and EMC have a long history of partnership. This announcement takes us to the next level with a deep collaboration in enabling the dynamic virtualized datacenter. The move by EMC to Intel Xeon processors is a significant step in delivering on this joint vision."

Michael Klayko, CEO of Brocade, said: "We envision an evolution toward a fully virtualized data center that offers tighter coordination among computing, storage and network elements than is available today. Our relationship and work with EMC is part of our differentiated strategy for best-in-class data center networking solutions. Brocade’s support of EMC’s new class of enterprise-class storage platforms extends the two companies’ long history of joint development and building solutions for enterprise data center infrastructures."

Didier Lamouche, Chairman and CEO of Bull, said: "For more than 15 years Bull has supported and deployed thousands of solutions based on EMC storage throughout Europe and the world. Many of our customers with mission critical data in all sectors of activity are finding they need more flexibility, predictable performance, and the ability to support demanding workloads of virtual server environments. The new EMC Symmetrix V-Max system is purpose built for these new requirements setting our customers up with the foundation necessary to build virtual data centers."

Ed Coleman, Chairman and CEO, Unisys Corporation, said: "EMC and Unisys have collaborated for more than 15 years to deliver solutions for the most demanding enterprise computing environments. EMC’s introduction of EMC Symmetrix V-Max adds a new level of value to that collaboration. Combining our services and solutions with the capabilities of EMC Symmetrix, Unisys can help our clients transform their data centers to speed access to critical information while dramatically simplifying storage management and reducing costs."

The New Symmetrix V-Max Tiered Storage System

The first new Symmetrix model based on the Virtual Matrix Architecture is the Symmetrix V-Max storage system, the world’s largest high-end storage array, featuring:

• Up to 128 Intel Xeon processor cores
• Up to 1 TB (terabyte) of global memory
• Fibre Channel/FICON/Gigabit Ethernet/iSCSI connectivity
• Latest generation Flash/Fibre Channel/SATA drive support
• Scale to 2,400 drives
• Maximum usable, protected capacity of 2 PBs (petabytes)

David Donatelli, President of the EMC Storage Division, said: "This is a new approach to storage in terms of both architecture and a new product. Customers moving to virtualized data centers need a storage architecture with flexibility for the future, one that uses less power, costs less with improved functionality and gives them the ability to scale and manage more information without adding resources. We’ve made significant investments over the past several years to develop the Virtual Matrix Architecture with these customer requirements in mind, and the result is another industry breakthrough for EMC."

New Zero Data-Loss Asynchronous Replication
EMC pioneered remote replication for the highest levels of information protection with its SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) software in 1994, and it remains the most innovative solution of its kind, used in large-scale mission-critical environments worldwide. EMC is introducing the new cost-effective, zero-data-loss SRDF Extended Distance Protection (EDP) feature for Symmetrix V-Max systems, which can reduce the cost of multi-site replication by up to 50 percent. SRDF is ideal for virtual server environments and has been integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and supports EMC Replication Manager for automated protection of VMware environments.

Accelerated Data Migrations For Improved Efficiency and Agility
To help customers take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture, EMC Global Services introduced a new EMC Migration Suite of tools and services to accelerate migration processes and execute migrations to the new architecture up to 50 percent faster and more efficiently. The EMC Migration Suite leverages comprehensive and unique best practices and EMC E-Lab( interoperability testing to minimize risk, time and complexity.

EMC Proven Solutions for Major Data Center Applications
The unique features of the Symmetrix V-Max systems provide customers with new efficient ways to address the needs of their most critical data center applications, including those from Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. EMC has an initial set of EMC Proven Solutions that help accelerate implementation of VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle applications with Symmetrix V-Max systems, with additional solutions under development. These documented best practices and services from industry experts take advantage of the full capabilities of the new Virtual Matrix Architecture to maximize resources at the lowest possible cost.

Ralf Lindenlaub, senior director, SAP NetWeaver Platform Services, SAP AG, said: "SAP and EMC share a vision for making business processes seamless and flexible. Our companies have worked closely for more than a decade to address some of the most pressing data center challenges facing our enterprise customers. The new Symmetrix systems, as part of our Center of Excellence environment, will enable us to work together to demonstrate customer proof of concepts, facilitate joint engineering work, and allow our mutual partners to run scalable SAP benchmarks in some of the areas of most interest to customers, including enterprise flash drives."

Innovative Financing Options
EMC Global Financial Services offers innovative financing options for Symmetrix V-Max systems that can help customers further lower their total cost of ownership.

Availability
The Symmetrix V-Max system is generally available today.

Details about the new architecture and new systems