New Anticipated EMC VNXs

Joined by partners and customers, EMC Corporation kicked off a 24-hour, around-the-world live launch from Milan, Italy, announcing new technologies that help give IT infrastructure teams the speed they need for their IT transformation.

The cornerstone of  news is the highly anticipated range of VNX unified storage systems (VNX5200, VNX5400, VNX5600, VNX5800, VNX7600, VNX8000 and VNX-F) that shatter the definition and economics of midrange storage. The new VNX raises the bar for application performance, storage efficiency, data protection, data availability and ease-of-use.

Organizations are transforming their IT infrastructures by adopting virtualization technology and cloud computing models. This enables them to be more agile while, at the same time, operate more efficiently. This is essential in an environment of ever-tightening budgets. But challenges remain. There are often hundreds or thousands of VMs with ever-increasing amounts of data and ever-increasing demands on performance and availability. Infrastructure teams need storage systems that enable them to do much more, for much less.

EMC delivered the new VNX Series that leverages the Intel Sandy Bridge technology and features new MCx (multi-core optimization) software that is flash optimized and accelerates the performance of virtualized applications. This boost to application performance, along with the VNX’s storage integration with vSphere (VNX is #1 for file, block and unified for the third year in a row according to a recent Wikibon study) makes VNX the platform for organizations adopting virtualization.

Midrange Price and Performance
Enabled with MCx software, the VNX Series is designed to address the high-performance, low-latency requirements of virtualized applications, which is the most common use case for midrange solutions. MCx software takes advantage of the latest Intel-multi core processing technology to optimize flash by distributing all VNX data services across all cores (up-to 32). This is a new approach for midrange arrays-enabling the new VNX to deliver the performance of the previous generation at one-third the price.

With a single VNX system powered by MCx,
customers can achieve:

• More than the performance of 4 previous generation systems combined-or 580,796 SPECsfs2008 nfs Ops/Sec (Overall Response Time = 0.78ms) according to the latest SPECsfs results.
• More than 3X performance for transactional NAS applications (such as VMware over NFS) with 60% faster response time than previous VNX systems.
• More than 735K concurrent Oracle and SQL OLTP IO/s-4X more than previous VNX systems.
• More than 6,600 VMs; a 6X improvement from the previous generation.
• More than 3X the bandwidth-up to 30Gb/s for Oracle and SQL data warehousing than previous generation.

Capacity Efficiency: 50% Or More Improvement
Typically only a few flash drives (on average less than 5% of the total capacity) are needed to optimize performance for virtualized applications. With the new VNX Series, customers can reduce capacity requirements with new fixed block deduplication. This is for VMs, virtual desktops, and other environments with redundant data across multiple sources. In addition, with enhancements to the EMC FAST suite-including 4X better tiering granularity and new eMLC drives, customers can further lower the cost per gigabyte. Couple the newly designed VNX Series with the latest version of the FAST suite and customers can lower their flash capacity requirements and VM costs-by 50% or more.

Ease-of-Use for Virtualized Environments
The VNX Series empowers storage specialists, virtualization managers or application administrators with increased visibility and self-service IT in virtualized environments. AppSync 1.5 delivers new self-service IT capabilities for VMware, Microsoft and database administrators who can protect their application with just one-click-across file and block. The new Unisphere Management Suite is designed to centrally manage up-to thousands of VNX/VNXe systems and servers with XtremSW Cache and also includes powerful monitoring and reporting capabilities for validating performance and capacity requirements.   

Expanded Flash Portfolio
A new flash-only VNX configuration (VNX-F) is also now available for environments demanding higher performance at lower latency for long periods of time. VNX-F delivers consistent high performance at lower latency compared to all disk or hybrid versions of the VNX.

For when even lower latency is required for transactional workloads, EMC also announced XtremSW Cache 2.0 server-flash caching software. According to a recent independent evaluation by Demartek, the addition of XtremSW Cache 2.0 to a flash-only configuration of the VNX8000 in a SQL Server workload reduced latency by another 65%. It also delivers greater interoperability with VMware vCenter, IBM AIX support and distributed cache coherency for Oracle RAC environments as well as increased support for any server flash SSD or PCIe hardware (including EMC XtremSF server flash hardware).

Continuous Application Data Availability
The VNX Series improves application availability and data protection for file and block-based applications. It simplifies online file system mobility between systems for improved availability. In addition, the VNX-CA is a new offering in the VNX family that is designed to deliver continuous availability for block data with the combination of the new VNX with VPLEX virtual storage to achieve higher levels of application uptime.

Availability and Services
New VNX Series systems and XtremSW Cache 2.0 are available. The VNX-CA solution and the XtremSW Cache 2.0 cache coherency for Oracle RAC capability are scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of 2013. The new VNX Series and XtremSW Cache are available through EMC and its channel partners. In addition, the new online EMC Store offers an additional resource for customers to research EMC products, compare features, review list prices, and request quotes.

In addition, the EMC Continuous Availability Advisory Services helps customers whose business requirements demand the ability to continue operations through any disruption. The service enables customers to assess their existing availability capabilities, as well as develop a transformative continuous availability strategy using the VNX-CA solution.

Ashish Nadkarni, research director, storage, IDC, said:  "The midrange market faces some serious challenges, among them being incredible growth, increasing management complexity, pressures to remain competitive, and budgets that rarely grow. Customers require technologies that squeeze every last drop of value out of their assets in both physical and virtual environments-and for their sake they better have flash technology as part of their plan. In keeping with its track record in the storage market, EMC has delivered a new storage platform that presents a fundamental change to how midrange storage customers can make the most out of flash within their arrays-compounded with a totally new level of price and performance that the midrange storage market has not witnessed before."

Tommy Meek, director of cloud infrastructure and building services, Cbeyond, said: "Cbeyond provides hosted Exchange services among its many business application offerings. We also use VNX in a VMware virtualized environment across our data centers. The new VNX Series-with MCx software-provides the performance, flexibility and ability to easily offer new services to customers. This is a competitive advantage for us. Plus, our customers also have both block and file needs. The new VNX gives us the flexibility to simply and efficiently provide both, and with blazing fast performance. It has allowed us to maximize our flash investments and have the power, efficiency and ease-of-use to easily grow, innovate and expand as we deliver reliable and highly available cloud services to our customers."

Russ Norman, senior manager, systems engineering, E*TRADE Financial Corp., said: "E*TRADE provides easy-to-use online brokerage, investing and related banking solutions at a competitive price to individual retail investors. Our IT infrastructure is critical to our business-powering our banking and trading applications. The new VNX Series, with MCx software, is running our data warehousing and decision support for these applications, which require very high performance and the ability to move lots of data-quickly, reliably and efficiently. The new VNX is enabling E*TRADE to adopt a hybrid flash environment into our storage infrastructure for our most business critical workloads."

Albertus Maritz, customer engineer, Real People (Pty) Ltd., said: "All of our information is entrusted to EMC storage and backup solutions across three data centers spanning Africa and London. As a financial institution, Real People is focused on keeping operational costs down, protecting our customers’ information and ensuring that our banking customers have access to their information whenever needed. We are using the new VNX arrays, and recently ran our SQL Server-based monthly financial reporting. The result was a 100% increase in speed-and we were able to complete this reporting process 2 hours faster than in the past with our previous VNX arrays. Beyond timing savings, the business impact for us is huge. It enables us to do far more with our data-faster-and provide more value to our banking customers. This is truly a revolutionary new array."

Carl Taylor, CTO, eData Solutions, said: "Using XtremSW Cache in our VNX environment has been a game changer for eData. The cost benefits are unbeatable. Now, with XtremSW Cache 2.0 we are able to easily view XtremSW Cache instances through the new version of Unisphere, which means we can clearly monitor performance gains from a single pane. In addition, we are approximately 90% virtualized on VMware, so the latest XtremSW Cache integration with VMware is something that’s especially appealing. The support for DRS and HA are going to make operations seamless."

Rich Napolitano, president, unified dtorage division, EMC, said: "Today’s news is a game changing approach to how midrange storage will serve the cloud and data centers of the future. The new VNX Series is a powerful foundation to help customers make the absolute most of their infrastructure, and leverage the performance and efficiency benefits of flash technology while also making it cost-effective-doing more for less. This has been a highly anticipated product introduction for us. We’ve dedicated a significant amount of resources, talent and innovation to ensure that our customers and partners around the world have a superior midrange storage array."

More about on EMC Pulse blog