Faster Connectivity for EMC Symmetrix V-Max

EMC Corporation strengthened the capabilities of its EMC Symmetrix V-Max, becoming the first to offer 8Gb/s connectivity and other features that enable customers to improve data center flexibility, performance and total cost of ownership.

The EMC Symmetrix V-Max is the first high-end storage system with native 8Gb/s host connectivity for both mainframe and open systems environment. With 8Gb/s capabilities Symmetrix V-Max systems now offer customers a 2X increase in available I/O. This allows for more efficient consolidation along with the delivery of higher levels of service at lower costs to meet the dynamic demands of today’s virtualized data centers and mainframe environments.

Additionally, EMC Virtual Provisioning for Symmetrix V-Max systems has been enhanced to improve utilization and reduce total cost of ownership. The new capabilities include zero space reclamation, thick-to-thin and thin-to-thick support for EMC TimeFinder/Clone software, and automated rebalancing of Virtual Provisioning storage pools as additional capacity is added. These enhancements enable IT organizations to reclaim up-to 40-percent of their allocated capacity when converting to Virtual Provisioning, while leveraging Virtual Provisioning inherent wide striping to improve performance and freeing capacity for future requirements.

EMC has also released several other Symmetrix V-Max system enhancements that help reduce acquisition, implementation and operational costs. These include new high-capacity Symmetrix V-Max system configurations built around 2 and 4 engines and software compression for EMC SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) traffic over both Fibre Channel and native Gigabit Ethernet connections. In further support of the growing demand for flash storage, Symmetrix V-Max now offers the ability to securely erase Flash Drives automatically prior to a drive replacement to protect the security of data.

New Connectivity: Symmetrix V-Max natively supports 8Gb Fibre Channel, 8Gb/s FICON, and 8Gb/s SRDF, allowing greater scale and improved performance for bandwidth intensive environments including large database servers and virtualized server deployments. Additionally, support for the mainframe zHPF protocol streamlines the FICON architecture to reduce I/O overhead and improve mainframe performance.

New Space Saving Capabilities: The zero space reclamation feature – through EMC Virtual Provisioning software – reclaims unused capacity from virtually provisioned volumes which might exist after migrating from thick volumes to thin volumes using migration utilities such as the Symmetrix Migration Package. Zero space reclamation will also recover contiguous data blocks containing all zeros, affording additional space recovery for sparse databases and file systems. This can significantly improve physical capacity utilization and drive down the total cost of ownership for customers. In addition virtual provisioning now also can automatically redistribute allocated data blocks as pools are extended with additional capacity, ensuring the optimal benefits of wide-striping.

New Replication Capabilities: With EMC TimeFinder/Clone Software, Symmetrix V-Max enables ‘thick to thin’ cloning, replicating standard volumes to smaller thinly-provisioned volumes by copying only written tracks. Zero space reclamation can also be applied to the clones to recover all-zero data blocks. Combined, this can reduce capacity requirements for clones, improving utilization and reducing the total cost of ownership. Thin volumes can also be replicated to standard volumes, extending their mobility into and out of thin pools.

New configurations: For customers who require large amounts of on-line capacity but do not require the connectivity or performance of five- to eight-engine V-Max configurations, EMC is now offering a 2 engine configuration that scales to 1200 drives and 4-engine configuration scaling to 2400 drives. With fewer engines, these new configurations offer customers lower acquisition cost for bulk data applications, such as data warehouse repositories.

These enhancements follow on the heels of EMC announcing availability of its fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology for EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems, and EMC Celerra unified storage. EMC FAST technology automates the movement of data within a storage system, replacing hours or even days of repetitive, manual storage administrative tasks. The new capabilities announced – and technologies such as EMC FAST technology – are helping IT organizations to manage more information more efficiently in a smaller footprint, use less power and cooling, and lower storage capital and operational costs.

"As more IT environments transition to virtualized environments, customers are challenged with improving performance while lowering costs. The enhancements announced today improve performance, resource utilization and automation. The new configuration flexibility provides customers a more cost-effective opportunity to take advantage of the Symmetrix V-Max strengths – as the standard in high-end storage. Collectively, the enhancements drive down both acquisition costs and total cost of ownership," said Brian Gallagher, Senior Vice President and General Manager, EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group.

Availability
All software enhancements, configurations and the new 8Gb/s connectivity announced are available immediately on EMC Symmetrix V-Max.