VMAX 10K, 20K and 40K

At EMC World 2012, EMC Corp. announced the new EMC VMAX family, consisting of the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and the newest member of the family, the VMAX 40K.

The new VMAX Family is a lineup of enterprise storage arrays, all built upon the Virtual Matrix Architecture first introduced in April 2009.

Complementing the new VMAX family is a host of new software capabilities that streamline operations and extend the VMAX to new hosts and applications, while integrating customers’ existing storage assets into an integrated and unified pool of storage resources. Combined, the scalable VMAX family offers a powerful, trusted, smart and efficient enterprise information infrastructure for deploying hybrid clouds.

It is anchored by the new VMAX 40K, a product that establishes maximums for performance, capacity and scale in the enterprise storage market. Delivering as much as 3X more performance and 2X the usable capacity of any other enterprise storage product, the VMAX 40K is optimized to support hyper-consolidation of demanding big data, transaction processing, analytics and cloud computing applications.

Customers are increasingly moving toward a hybrid cloud model – which delivers the flexibility and choice to store and serve information within the cloud, while maintaining control over their mission critical applications. The hybrid cloud is delivering customers the opportunity to run their businesses smarter and efficiently. The new VMAX family, and enhancements to Enginuity, are purpose-built to be the foundation for enterprises of all sizes as they transform their IT environments to take advantage of the hybrid cloud.

With this announcement EMC is delivering:

Powerful

• Leveraging up to 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeon 6-core processors, as much as 2TB of mirrored (1TB usable) and ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM, and twice as much internal fabric bandwidth as the original VMAX, the new VMAX 40K delivers new levels of performance and scale. With more than 3X the sustained cache-miss bandwidth and 2X the total IOPS than any competing array, the VMAX 40K is in a class of its own.
• VMAX 40K supports up to 4PB of usable capacity, 2X the VMAX 20K’s 2PB usable and nearly 3X the 1.5PB usable capacity of the VMAX 10K.
• The new high density option for the VMAX 40K utilizes 2.5" SAS drives to support up to 3.2PB in a footprint that is a 1/3 smaller and uses 1/3 less power than the equivalent configuration using 3.5" drives.
• New 2.5" eMLC Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) deliver the performance, reliability and life expectancy of SLC-based EFDs, at a lower price than comparable 3.5" SLC EFDs. Available initially only on VMAX 40K high-density configurations, these new eMLC EFDs allow customers to build FAST VP configurations that cost-effectively utilize more flash and more nearline capacity to improve both $/GB and $/IOPS.

Trusted

• Federated Tiered Storage (FTS) provides active data integrity checking on all data in external arrays to protect against silent data corruption. Such corruption can occur in arrays that do not provide integrity validation of their own. VMAX and VNX families natively implement stringent integrity assurances-functionality that is exclusive to EMC.
• FAST hinting to remote replica devices ensures proper data layout for optimal performance in the event of a fail-over / fail-back event-functionality that is exclusive to EMC.
• EMC RecoverPoint for VMAX delivers enterprise heterogeneous local and remote replication of VMAX with point-in-time recovery. This provides the flexibility to replicate to/from heterogeneous storage combined with point-in-time recovery for the entire VMAX family – as well as EMC VPLEX virtual storage. This functionality is exclusive to EMC.

Smarter

• The new Federated Tiered Storage enables customers to consolidate and simplify management and operations of their disparate storage assets. By putting heterogeneous storage arrays behind VMAX, customers can now use trusted Symmetrix SRDF and TimeFinder software for business continuity, FAST VP for improved performance, and others to extend the life and value of existing storage arrays in the data center.
• FAST VP for mainframe count-key data (CKD) volumes, affording the performance, economic and scale benefits of FAST VP to mainframe-based workloads and applications.
• Virtual Provisioning and FAST VP for IBM i (D910 formatted devices) – prior limited to scaling performance with only 15K rpm devices, VMAX is the first storage platform to bring the benefits of thin provisioning and automated tiering to IBM i customers. This functionality is exclusive to EMC.
• The latest version of EMC ProSphere delivers the ability to manage storage, server and network resources through a single pane of glass. ProSphere now reports on host capacity use by FAST policy to enhance reporting in FAST VP environments. It will also show external capacity imported through FTS providing a single management console for analyzing and reporting on all capacity consumed across the data center including VMAX and external federated capacity.

Efficient

• The new Unisphere for VMAX is a management interface that simplifies and streamlines storage operations and management while providing a common look and experience across the entire VMAX family as well as VNX family, EMC VPLEX, and RecoverPoint products. Unisphere for EMC VMAX is easier, faster, and more intuitive, while providing VMAX administrators with real-time utilization and performance monitoring.
• New ProSphere integrated support for FAST VP utilization monitoring and policy-based charge-back-functionality that is exclusive to EMC.

All of these new products, features and capabilities are shipping and introduced to EMC World attendees through a combination of keynote addresses, engineering-led product sessions, trade show demonstrations and hands-on Labs running on EMC’s Demo Cloud.

Fabio Grignani, deputy GM and COO, SIA S.p.A., said: "SIA is a European leader in technology infrastructures and services for financial and central banking institutions, corporations and public administration bodies for payments, online banking, network services and capital markets. SIA annually manages nearly 8.1 billion transactions relating to card, collections and payments-on overage this adds up to approximately 63 million cards, 22.3 billion transactions on financial markets and we also carried 11.2 thousand billion bytes of data over our network. Processing millions of transactions everyday means that performance, availability and reliability in our mainframe storage environment is central to our IT strategy. Together, the new VMAX 40K and FAST VP for Mainframe will help SIA in achieving dynamic performance optimization of our flash tier-automatically. EMC is enabling SIA to make better use of all tiered capacity for unmatched performance gains, which means we can focus on continuing to deliver world-class service to our customers."

Benjamin Woo, program VP, Worldwide Storage System, IDC, said: "EMC is yet again setting the bar in high end storage with the VMAX 40K and these new software capabilities. As customers continue to virtualize their IT environments and move toward cloud-particularly with hybrid clouds – innovations like VMAX 40K, FTS, and simplified management capabilities are central to achieving the level of performance, data protection and management customers are facing."

Brian Gallagher, president, Enterprise Storage Division at EMC, said: "The hybrid cloud and big data are two transformative mega-trends in the industry today. More and more IT professionals are embracing these trends to make their businesses run smarter and more efficiently. With today’s news, the VMAX Family is building upon its existing portfolio of high end solutions, and delivering new hardware and software capabilities that are purpose-built for these Hybrid Cloud environments. As the IT industry embarks on one of its most transformative eras with the onset of cloud and Big Data, the market-leading VMAX family continues to set the pace for the high end storage market."