“Hello World” - VMAXe

A busy week indeed… Tuesday, the vSphere 5 details being launched on the world.   Wednesday the most powerful, the most trusted, the smartest array – the EMC VMAX - gets it’s new smaller, simpler, entry-level sibling – the EMC VMAXe!

I wonder what Thursday will hold? :-)

The VMAXe has the same core design as a VMAX, very robust, very scalable, and uses the Virtual Matrix for a scale-out core design principle.

But, it’s also designed to be small, flexible, and designed for the needs of a market VMAX (and VNX) didn’t adequately serve, so has some engineered design changes:

• Designed for standard 19 inch racks (VMAX presumes bigger, VMAX cabinets)
• Designed standard L6-30R power drops  (VMAX takes 50A drops)
• Designed to be installed and in use in 4 minutes
• Scales to 4 engines (an engine is an HA pair of westmere based “brains”, so this is an 8-node “cluster” to handle all storage brains) vs. the 8 in a VMAX.   Remember that each “engine” is analagous to the clustered pair of controllers you see in most mid-range arrays.
• Integrated Recoverpoint Splitter for simple replication
• Focus on ease of use and simplicity throughout

We were fortunate enough to have VMAXe in my basement at Chad’s World – along with a great customer – Doug @ Columbia Sportswear – thank you!

Click on the below to check it out live and in action (and see the customer’s view)

Comments

[Teeglasgow]

There were lots of people stopping the EMC booth at Cisco Live looking at and asking questions about the VMAXe. Very well-received.

[Sean]

Are there any major differences in FAST or FAST policies between VMAXe and VMAX?

Still tiered in 7MB blocks analyzed every 10 minutes ?

Any roadmap for IP storage integration ?

Looks very cool though.

[Richard]

"Designed to be installed and in use in 4 minutes" : Are you sure :D ? It must be 4 hours ;)

[david robertson]

@sean it still uses the same FAST Policy mechanism, but the VMAXe is running the newest 5875 which i the Q2 release. It has some more FAST options than the previous version in 5875. But its moved at 756k blocks that are analyzed in groups of 10 at a time.

@richard, yes from putting on the floor to first IO in 4 hours.

[david robertson]

@sean there are some policy enchancements in the latest release of 5875 that comes on the VMAXe out of the factory, but not major feature changes. Its still move din 768k block, its scanned in segments of 10, and the time can be adjusted. No IP that I am aware of, we got VNX and Isilon for that!

@richard yes i think he meant 4 hours :) which is still really fast!