EMC Enhances Entry-Level Symmetrix VMAX 10K

EMC Corporation has updated its VMAX family, making it more powerful, smarter, more trusted, and more efficient for mission-critical applications in VMware virtualized environments for enterprises of all sizes.

The VMAX 10K (entry product to the VMAX Family) is now up to 2X more powerful than its predecessor.

EMC also introduced new features to the VMAX Family (10K, 20K and 40K) through updates to VMAX Enginuity software. As customers continue to transform their IT environments, and deploy virtualized hybrid clouds, they must tackle consolidation of their most mission-critical applications. Customers across the globe rank EMC as the #1 storage choice for mission-critical environments according to a study from IDC (Storage Users Demand Survey 2011 – Fall Edition: Customers Still Want Choice, #234651.) These enhancements enable customers to implement virtualization and cloud easily and efficiently .

These VMAX 10K technology enhancements make it easier for SMBs to enjoy the capabilities of the VMAX family. It is for this reason that in the third quarter of 2012, 30% of VMAX 10K sales were customers new to the VMAX family.

In 2009, EMC first introduced the VMAX Family and the Virtual Matrix Architecture-purpose-built storage for the virtual data center that delivers unprecedented levels of scalability, efficiency, data integrity, availability and performance. EMC building upon that foundation with today’s enhancements to the VMAX 10K so that customers benefit from ultra-fast application performance and faster CPUs. The VMAX 10K also offers new features previously only available on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K.

VMAX 10K-specific  Enhancements

• Increased performance for critical applications in virtualized environments-achieving up to 100% faster performance – with support for faster CPUs with 50% more cores. This enables applications like Oracle OLTP in VMware environments to run up to 90% faster.
• Enhanced protection against data theft and improved compliance in regulated industries (e.g. government and healthcare) with the Data At Rest Encryption (D@RE) feature, which encrypts all data on all drive types without performance penalty. (Already offered on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K).
• Maximizes existing storage investments with an additional tier of storage-including non-EMC storage arrays – with new support for Federated Tiered Storage feature capability-achieves up-to a 15% TCO savings. (Already offered on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K).
• More efficiency with support for denser 2.5" drives, enabling 2X more usable drives per tile, which also reduces weight and power consumption on both the VMAX 10K and VMAX 40K by 1/3 compared to 3.5" drives.

VMAX Family Enhancements

• Better management and performance with new Host I/O Limits feature for the VMAX Family, making performance more predictable and easier to manage in consolidation and multi-tenancy environments. Now customers can choose how many IOPS or how much bandwidth to give each application or user. This capability is critical in cloud environments, or when consolidating many critical applications.
• Performance for VMware vSphere 5 environments breaking the 2 million IOPS barrier (with VMAX 40K).
• Simplified management with EMC Unisphere for the VMAX Family now includes enhanced integration with the VMware platform, VFCache, Windows 2012, and the ability to manage all major features of VMAX.
• More efficiency with FAST VP through support for a 4 tiers and cold data compression, with up to a 2:1 capacity savings on inactive data. In addition, even more cost and floor space savings can be achieved using 3TB drives and mixed 2.5"/3.5" DAEs with FAST VP.

Sun Zhiguang, manager of Operation and Maintenance Department in Business Support Center, China Mobile Group, Hebei Company Limited (Hebei MCC), said: "Hebei MCC is part of China Mobile Group, which offers the world’s largest mobile network to the world’s largest mobile customer base. As the sixth largest subsidiary of the China Mobile Group, Hebei MCC serves more than 50 million customers in the Hebei province of China. Hebei MCC relies on EMC VMAX 10K to store, manage and protect customer information from our mission-critical billing application. With these new enhancements to the VMAX 10K, we are achieving new levels of performance. In addition, the new features in Enginuity enable Hebei MCC to provide even better service to customers across China."

Brian Carpenter, VP of IT, Heritage Auctions, said: "As the largest collectibles auctioneer and third largest auction house in the world, Heritage Auctions relies on VMAX 10K storage for our mission-critical SQL Server-based website and auction applications. Our infrastructure is now over 90% virtualized on the VMware platform. When we first purchased our VMAX 10K it came bundled with everything one would expect in a virtualization-optimized tier-one solution. With these new updates, EMC is delivering us the operational headroom to effectively handle a 5X spike in performance and demand-with zero impact on our delivery of data to customers. In addition, we plan to use the FTS feature, to maximize our benefit from our legacy storage arrays."

Mike Chrystal, senior technical specialist, Storage and Servers, St. Charles Health System, Inc., said: "St. Charles Health System is the primary health care provider for patients living in and around Central Oregon. Our number one concern is the welfare of our patients. To deliver the absolute best patient care-and ensure their information is both protected and available-we rely on EMC backup and recovery solutions and VMAX 10K storage to store, manage and protect our VMware vSphere 5.0 virtualized environment. This includes mission critical Oracle and Microsoft applications, as well as our electronic medical records (with McKesson) and ambulatory care system (with All Scripts) data. With these new enhancements to the VMAX 10K for blazing performance and Enginuity update for new levels of efficiency and management, we have even more confidence and trust that our patients’ information will be safe and readily accessible."

Chris Wetzel, solution line leader for Dedicated Storage and Data Preservation, Rackspace, US Inc., said: "Rackspace customers demand the highest levels of performance and availability. We’re focused on delivering bulletproof reliability and great customer service-that’s why we use VMAX as the foundation for one of our most vital storage solutions, Shared SAN. We plan to use EMC’s new performance control feature, part of Enginuity, to determine how much resource (IOPS, bandwidth etc.), to give each user. This is critical in shared environments or when you’re consolidating many applications. With VMAX, we believe we deliver a more reliable infrastructure to support the needs of our customers."

Stuart Miniman, senior analyst, Wikibon, said: "The latest enhancements to VMware vSphere, coupled with storage innovations like this latest version of VMAX 10K and updates to EMC’s Enginuity software, are delivering customers the performance, reliability and operational efficiency needed in their Tier-1 storage environments. With these types of advancements, the technical barriers of virtualizing mission critical applications are eliminated. In addition to virtualization, customers are also citing deploying automation, such as tiering, at the top of their priority list. With EMC FTS technology, customers now have more flexibility to optimize their existing storage infrastructure by adding another tier of storage."

Brian Gallagher, president, Enterprise Storage Division, EMC, said: "The world’s most sensitive and mission-critical information is stored, managed and protected by EMC. Today we’re delivering another wave of innovation, enabling enterprises of all sizes to access the value of the VMAX Family’s entry-level VMAX 10K. We have thousands of engineers dedicated to inventing new ways for our customers to meet the demands of virtual data centers. As customers continue down their paths to Hybrid Clouds and leveraging Big Data to transform their businesses, we will continue to partner with customers and innovate to accelerate their journey."

EMC Global Services enables customers to accelerate their VMAX infrastructure deployments by creating strategies to transform from physical to virtual environments. Leveraging EMC technology and virtual storage integration services, VMAX customers can take advantage of VMware integration features in their new VMAX infrastructure. This includes provisioning storage directly through vCenter and optimizing load balancing at the VM level to better support the demands of virtual computing, and to optimize both new and existing EMC infrastructure for the cloud. All technologies announced are shipping and available worldwide through EMC and channel partners.