EMC Enhances VMAXe

EMC Corporation announced several enhancements to the VMAXe enterprise storage system – announced in July – delivering customers with limited storage expertise and IT resources even more powerful, trusted and efficient enterprise storage.

The VMAXe is now more powerful with support for more than 1,000 drives, and is available as an all-Flash VMAXe configuration; is more trusted with a new disaster recovery software option called SRDFe; and is even more efficient with new support for 100 GB Flash and 2.5" SAS disk drives. EMC also extended its integration with VMware, offering new VMAXe integration with VMware vSphere 5 cloud infrastructure platform. It’s these type of customer-driven innovations which led customers to recognize EMC as the #1 storage choice for Microsoft, Oracle and other mission critical environments in a recent survey by IDC.

Technology Highlights:

• More Powerful: The VMAXe delivers more scale supporting more-than 1,000-drives in a fully-populated VMAXe array-operating with a choice of either 96 GB or 128 GB of cache. The VMAXe is also now available as an all-flash configuration (also available with VMAX), for customers requiring the lowest response time, highest I/Os per second, and most energy-efficient systems in their virtual data center.
• More Trusted: The new SRDFe for VMAXe is a version of EMC’s SRDF that is sized specifically for VMAXe environments-supporting replication for up to 8,000 Symmetrix devices, which can include a mix of those in synchronous or asynchronous, and adaptive copy modes. In addition to the already available EMC RecoverPoint on VMAXe, customers now have more options in deploying either of these disaster recovery solutions. With both SRDFe and RecoverPoint supported on VMAXe, customers now have multiple ways to integrate with VMware’s vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.
• More Efficient: New VMAXe support for VMware vCenter Server plug-ins, enabling coordination between the VMware platform and either VMAXe or VMAX, provides built-in storage insight in the VMware environment. This supports intelligent virtual machine storage provisioning, bolsters storage troubleshooting, and enables the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) solution related use cases for storage. This bi-directional ‘server-to-storage’ and ‘storage-to-server’ capability is unique to EMC. Additionally, customers now have flexible configurations to leverage flash technology-including new 100 GB drives, Fibre Channel, SATA, and new efficient 2.5" SAS drives in the same disk array enclosure. Support for these new drive technologies further exploit the cost and performance efficiencies available with EMC FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools).

Brian Carpenter, Director of Information Technology at Heritage Auctions, said: "Heritage Auctions is the largest collectibles auctioneer and third largest auction house in the world. The VMAXe is a killer product, which is why we chose it for our mission-critical SQL Server-based website, auction applications and to accelerate our move to a 98% virtualized infrastructure. With these new enhancements – 100 GB flash drives, 2.5" SAS, new VMware integration, and SRDFe – combined with EMC FAST VP and RecoverPoint software, the VMAXe delivers the power, availability, and efficiencies we need to respond to any request while also keeping our data highly available and secure. The VMAXe just keeps getting better."  

Mark Peters, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Mission critical virtualized server environments of all sizes require storage that provides high levels of performance, availability, data integrity, and security; however it’s increasingly important – given the ‘ultra’ demands of today’s new virtual data centers – to have storage that can also self-tune and optimize itself for virtual computing. VMAX and VMAXe both offer all the above attributes, together with tight support for the latest VMware capabilities; the package is now made more attractive with additional drive technology options and flexibility that extend customers’ choices in terms of cost and performance."

Brian Gallagher, President, Enterprise Storage Division, EMC, said: "The Symmetrix VMAX family continues to be the #1 storage choice for virtual environments because of EMC’s industry-leading VMware integration and unique FAST VP technology for cost and performance optimization. The VMAXe enables more IT organizations, both domestically and in rapidly expanding markets such as India, China, Eastern Europe and others, to accelerate their journey to cloud computing. Adoption rates of VMAXe have exceeded expectations-and EMC will continue to innovate to deliver scalable performance, automated tiering and other high-end capabilities-such as SRDFe, new drive support, VMware integration and new levels of scale-at the right level for this type of customer."