New EMC VNX Shatters the definition and economics of midrange storage

Today, joined by EMC partners and customers, EMC Corporation kicked off a 24-hour, around-the-world live launch announcing new technologies that give IT infrastructure teams the speed they need to lead their IT transformation.

The cornerstone of today’s news is the new, 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.

Organizationsare aggressively 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 virtual machines 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 today delivered the new VNX Series that leverages the latest Intel Sandy Bridge technology and features powerfulnew MCx(multi-core optimization) software thatis flash optimizedand accelerates the performance of virtualized applications.This boost to application performance, along with the EMC VNX’sindustry leading storage integration with VMware® 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 ideal platform for organizations aggressively adopting virtualization.  

Revolutionary Midrange Price and Performance 

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

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

Equivalent performance of 4 previous generation systems combined—or 580,796 SPECsfs2008 nfs Ops/Sec (Overall Response Time = 0.78 msec) 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 IOPS – 4X more than previous VNX systems.

More than 6,600 virtual machines – a 6X improvement from the previous VNX systems.

More than 3X the bandwidth –up to 30GB/secondfor Oracle and SQL data warehousing than previous VNX systems. 

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 performancefor virtualized applications. With the new VNX Series, customers can reduce capacity requirements with new fixed block deduplication. This is ideal for virtual machines, 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 Enterprise Multi-Level Cell (eMLC) drives—customers can even 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 virtual machine costs, by 50% or more. 

Industry Leading Ease-of-Use for Virtualized Environments

EMC is the #1 storage for mission critical applications such as Microsoft and VMware. The new VNX Series builds upon this leadership by empowering 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 Best of Breed Flash Portfolio

A new flash-only VNX configuration (VNX-F) is also now available for environments demanding higher performance at lower latencyfor 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 today also announced EMC 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 aSQL Serverworkloadreduced latency by another 65%. XtremSW Cache 2.0 also delivers greater interoperability with VMware vCenter, industry first IBM AIX support and distributed cache coherency for Oracle RAC environments as well asincreased support for any server flash SSD or PCIehardware (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. The new VNX 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 powerful combination of the new VNX with EMC VPLEX virtual storage to achieve higher levels of application uptime. 

Analyst Quote

AshishNadkarni, Research Director, Storage at IDC: “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.” 

EMC Executive Quote

Rich Napolitano, President, Unified Storage Division at EMC: “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 technologywhile 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.”