EMC Federates Petabytes of Storage for Private Cloud

EMC Corporation unveiled new technology that advances Virtual Storage and will enable new models of computing. Virtual Storage is a key component of a private cloud – an information technology (IT) infrastructure that lowers costs, improves quality of service and is more agile. New EMC VPLEX technology is a radically new and better approach to data access and mobility, changing distance from a barrier that must be overcome to an asset that can be exploited.

It will ultimately allow organizations to non-disruptively move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information over thousands of miles, schedule daily batch processes in locations with lower energy costs, easily shift IT operations out of the way of regional disasters, and dynamically balance workloads as the business day progresses around the globe.

• EMC advances Virtual Storage with industry’s first distributed storage federation capabilities, eliminating boundaries of physical storage and allowing information resources to be transparently pooled and shared over distance for new levels of efficiency, control and choice.
• Groundbreaking EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro products address fundamental challenges of rapidly relocating applications and large amounts of information on-demand within and across data centers which is a key enabler of the private cloud.
• Future EMC VPLEX versions will add cross-continental and global capabilities, allowing multiple data centers to be pooled over extended distances, providing dramatic new distributed compute and service-provider models and private clouds.

EMC VPLEX, combined with other EMC Virtual Storage technologies like FAST (fully automated storage tiering) are transforming storage arrays in the same way server virtualization technology has transformed physical servers – from dedicated single-purpose machines to highly efficient, flexible, aggregated resources shared across multiple operating environments and geographies. The federation of compute and storage resources together allows entire data centers to be virtualized and managed as a single resource. This allows organizations to rethink their entire data center strategies, their locations, the number of them and ultimately the role that each plays in the overall IT environment.

A key to Virtual Storage is the federation of distributed storage arrays, which is a breakthrough component of the new VPLEX technology.  Federation transparently pools the resources of multiple storage systems locally and over distance and allows them to work together.  Federated storage is not only more efficient than its physical predecessors; it also allows IT organizations to aggregate separate data centers and service providers into a large virtual data center.  

New EMC VPLEX:
Technology based on 20 years of leadership
EMC VPLEX represents a major step in the journey to the private cloud and IT as a service. EMC VPLEX combines scale-out clustering and advanced data caching with unique distributed cache coherence intelligence to allow data to be accessed and shared across hosts and clusters within and across data centers. In addition, VPLEX is architected to be ‘array aware’ to preserve investments in existing storage infrastructure and software functionality while adding new value through federation and the ability to pool resources over distance. EMC’s approach to distributed cache coherency is the unique technology that addresses the inherent challenges of latency, bandwidth and consistency that arise when regularly accessing and relocating large amounts of information over distances in real time.

EMC first introduced the performance benefits of integrated cache –  pre-staging the most frequently accessed data into electronic memory for near instant response times – in its first Symmetrix storage system two decades ago and holds numerous patents in this area. This expertise, combined with acquired intellectual property, and a multi-year development effort, has resulted in a fundamental information storage breakthrough called AccessAnywhere that is first being delivered in a new product family and will eventually be integrated into other EMC storage solutions.

New EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro:
Managing data mobility and access
EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro are the first two products to utilize this new technology. A solution that resides between the servers and heterogeneous storage arrays, each is comprised of high-availability VPLEX Engines that encompass two separate VPLEX Directors, each featuring high performance multi-core Intel Xeon processors, 32GB intelligent cache pools and 8 Gb/s (gigabit per second) Fibre Channel host and array connections. EMC has qualified the new VPLEX systems with major hosts, clusters, operating systems, virtualization platforms, storage area network (SAN) infrastructure, and EMC and non-EMC storage systems.

EMC VPLEX Local Features:

• Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility within, across and between EMC and non-EMC storage platforms within a single site/data center.
• Simplifies recurring information movement and improves storage utilization.
• Features a single cluster with up to 4 VPLEX Engines (8 Directors) with support for up to 8,000 virtualized storage volumes.

EMC VPLEX Metro Features:

• Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility between EMC and non-EMC platforms.
• Ability to link two separate VPLEX clusters within a data center or up to 100 km apart and to federate some or all of the storage volumes across both clusters, effectively presenting these ‘stretched’ volumes at each site as if they were local, shared volumes.
• Able to synchronously relocate and synchronize data I/O, between two sites up to 100km apart (5ms round-trip response time maximum).
• Ability for any data volume to be configured for simultaneous access by applications in two locations, enabling relocation, sharing and balancing infrastructure resources.
• Validated EMC Proven reference architecture leveraging VMware VMotion for long-distance live migrations to transparently move and relocate active virtual machines between VMware vSphere clusters over synchronous distance for Microsoft, SAP and Oracle applications.
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration to transparently move and relocate active Virtual Machines for more dynamic IT operations.
• Support for Oracle VM 2.2 with Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux and Windows guest hosts and EMC PowerPath with the ability to move workloads between servers locally with Live Migration and between locations using VPLEX Metro.
• Features two clusters with up to 4 VPLEX Engines each and support for up to 16,000 virtualized data volumes.

Future Capabilities: VPLEX Geo and VPLEX Global
Future planned products include VPLEX Geo, which will enable asynchronous federation of VPLEX clusters to support requirements such as data center migrations/consolidation and application relocation over cross-continental distances. Also planned for future delivery is VPLEX Global, which will enable distributed concurrent data access and workload relocations across multiple global locations over both synchronous and asynchronous distances. These products, which will be rolled out beginning in 2011, deliver completely new computing and data center models that provide the foundation to fully enable the private cloud.  

VPLEX Services and Solutions
VPLEX is designed to be customer installable and EMC also offers a range of design, assessment and implementation services. In addition, EMC has strategic relationships with leading networking, virtualization and application partners to deliver integrated EMC Proven solutions that support customers’ industry, business and technical requirements. All solutions are rigorously tested and documented with reference architectures and best practices designed to reduce total cost of ownership and ensure a predictable and reliable outcome.

Availability
The EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro systems are available immediately from EMC and can be purchased via standard capacity-based licenses or as a private cloud-based ‘pay-as-you-go’ subscription licensing approach designed specifically for VPLEX.

"AOL is one of the largest producers of digital content in the world and has virtualized its information infrastructure in a cloud computing environment. We’ve deployed more than 10 EMC VPLEX virtual storage clusters at data centers in the U.S. and in Germany to help us more effectively manage several petabytes of storage capacity used by applications running on thousands of servers. Providing our users with fast access to their information is critical to our business. With the VPLEX clusters, we’ve been able to easily provision huge chunks of storage to speed the introduction of new services and shift workloads to meet demand.  With a true cloud computing environment, we’re looking to use VPLEX to help us extend it even more for even better flexibility, protection and asset utilization," said Will Stevens, Senior Director of Storage Operations at AOL.

"The great thing about the EMC VPLEX system is that it allows us to start treating our data centers as a virtual data center without being constrained by geographic boundaries. We can use VPLEX to instantly remap the storage and reroute the data load. As the load shifts from data center to data center, VPLEX allows us the flexibility to continually keep adjusting our virtual storage platform to meet the load growth. This is a great outcome for us and our customers. I think the real benefits our customers will see from Melbourne IT implementing VPLEX is a range of new products and services in the hosting space that allows us to spread a service across multiple geographic-diverse data centers which is uplifting the availability and disaster recovery capabilities for mission-critical applications," said Glenn Gore, Chief Technology Officer at global IT services provider Melbourne IT.

"Our data centers support one of the largest enterprises in Switzerland and our infrastructure is designed to provide our customers and employees with secure, reliable and fast access to information about products, orders and transactions. With the EMC VPLEX system, we’re able to better utilize our two data centers and provide a high-availability environment with active/active access to information for our main production systems. In addition, VPLEX gives us the ability to failover and shift storage and computing resources between data centers if needed. As part of a cooperative, we are owned by our customers, and maximum utilization of our IT resources is a major part of ensuring the best return on our IT investments," said Patrick Mosberger, Head of IT at GMOS, part of the Swiss MIGROS cooperative, the largest retail and grocery chain in Switzerland.

"EMC is on its own journey to the private cloud with its internal infrastructure and VPLEX is helping us accelerate it. The improved agility, utilization and availability we’re seeing with our SANs as a result is similar to what we experienced with our servers when we implemented VMware vSphere. Our installation of VPLEX took less than 4 hours and we were installed, configured and totally operational. Going forward, the geographic federation capabilities of VPLEX will enable a whole host of optimization strategies that have never before been possible with our data centers around the world," said Jon Peirce, EMC’s vice president of Global IT Infrastructure and Services.

"CIOs increasingly want to extend beyond the four walls of their data centers and bring together as one their assets around the world, and federation is the technology that allows them to do that.  One of the past challenges about leveraging IT resources around the world is that you actually had to forklift, if you like, the data from one geographic area to another. What VPLEX enables you to do is access this information anywhere. VPLEX and distributed cache coherency certainly demonstrates innovative leadership in the marketplace for EMC. We’re seeing what the private cloud can truly look like with this technology," said Benjamin Woo, Vice President for Enterprise Storage Systems with IDC.

"Brocade and EMC have helped more than 20,000 joint customers simplify their IT infrastructure, reduce costs and increase their business agility. The combination of Brocade networking solutions and EMC VPLEX will now allow entire data centers to be virtualized and managed as a single resource, which represents a major step in the journey to the private cloud. We are pleased to be partnering with EMC to help enable high performance virtualization, data center convergence and private cloud infrastructures," said John McHugh, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Brocade.

"VPLEX is the world’s first platform to remove the physical barriers within and between data centers. Cisco Data Center interconnect solutions are jointly tested and validated with EMC VPLEX and VMware vSphere Cloud OS to deliver solutions that are faster to deploy, de-risked and highly secure to accelerate technology adoption, increase the return on investment and reduce the total cost of ownership. Cisco with EMC and VMware are committed to the development of innovative technologies and solutions that enable next generation data centers where workloads and data can utilize the power of virtualization to dynamically migrate between private and public clouds transparently and securely," said Walt Blomquist, Vice President Systems Architecture and Strategy Unit, Cisco.

"Intel and EMC share many attributes of a common cloud vision. We believe that data needs to be federated so that it can securely move from private to public clouds and between public clouds. At Intel we’re committed to delivering unprecedented levels of performance, reliability and availability, and energy efficiency as we build out this new cloud architecture. Last year, EMC moved the Symmetrix VMAX platform to Intel Xeon processors, fully utilizing their capabilities. Now with the VPLEX platform we’re delivering yet another level of innovation between EMC and Intel," said Kirk Skaugen, Vice President, General Manager, Data Center Group, Intel Corp.

"Customers interested in the EMC VPLEX will be able to extend the value of Microsoft virtualization solutions as they drive towards private clouds. By using EMC VPLEX’s new architecture for data mobility, customers using Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center will benefit from a range of options to improve the flexibility, responsiveness and scalability of their IT environments," said Jim Schwartz, Director of Solutions Marketing, Virtualization at Microsoft Corp.

"Oracle and EMC have a longstanding relationship, with thousands of mutual customers relying on EMC technology and Oracle databases, middleware, applications and Oracle VM. Working closely with EMC, from an engineering point of view, has allowed us to help ensure that Oracle VM and EMC VPLEX work well together. By using Oracle VM and EMC VPLEX our customers are able to share storage across multiple data centers, and optimize the use of their data center resources," said Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Development, Oracle.

"Customers building private clouds on VMware vSphere already benefit from managing a highly flexible pool of datacenter resources. Storage is a particularly critical part of these pooled resources, and the added flexibility that VPLEX provides will add to today’s benefits. Within a datacenter, VPLEX will make it easier to add and remove storage resources as needed, providing elasticity. However, the ability of VPLEX to maintain a coherent view of storage across datacenters is what’s extra exciting. This storage capability can be the basis of even more flexible private clouds that span locations while beginning to pave the way to connect private and public clouds more seamlessly for availability and performance reasons. Ultimately I see the promise of these datacenter-spanning capabilities as helping convert the geographical separation of datacenters from today’s impediment to tomorrow’s advantage," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, VMware.

"VPLEX is groundbreaking technology and that will change the way data centers are designed and managed. It’s a core component of EMC’s Virtual Storage vision and will do to storage what server virtualization has done to computing and will provide game changing levels of efficiency and flexibility. The ability to share, move and access large amounts of data regardless of location is a key element of the Journey to the Private Cloud. VPLEX technology will enable follow the sun computing, the relocating of workloads to low-cost energy regions or moving them out of the way of approaching storms – in general, IT environments will be more dynamic and flexible than ever before," said Patrick Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products.

"EMC has more than 20 years of expertise in designing, understanding and perfecting carrier-class distance and caching solutions. These capabilities and intellectual property have come together as VPLEX. It is a highly resilient, transparent, scale-out architecture that solves fundamentally hard problems that arise when routinely moving petabytes of data. This is critical technology that will enable the journey to the private cloud," said Brian Gallagher, President EMC Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group.