VNX/VNXe Updates – Bigger, Faster, Stronger

VNX and VNXe started shipping in volume in March, and demand has been overwhelming – which rocks!  

So – 2 months have passed since volume shipping, and 5 months since the announcement, which means it’s time for a TON of new stuff :-)

The VNXe has been a hit – customers, partners everyone loves the extreme simplicity, advanced functionality, multi-protocol block/NAS capabilities, VMware and application integration built in, tight packaging, and of course the low cost.

When the VNXe was being developed, we knew that the SMB market was something that EMC didn’t really have a strong track record in (Iomega notwithstanding), so we needed to really nail it.   But, we also suspected that there were a ton of OEM use cases that we had never addressed.  Since then I’ve been pulled into the coolest discussions about this.   VNXe’s in tanks, on boats (even using VPLEX to have stretched vSphere clusters across larger military vehicles so they can withstand substantial fire and damage – wow).   And that’s the just beginning of the OEM use cases.

So – perhaps it’s not a surprise to see an OEM application – Themis has partnered with EMC to create a hardened, ruggedized VNXe for a variety of military uses – pretty darn cool.

On the VNX front – the list is long.  

We haven’t been talking about it as much as we could, but the amount of bandwidth you can drive through a VNX is very impressive.  10GBps is possible on even the VNX5700.   That’s a lot.   That’s 80Gbps, or put another way, the bandwidth of 8 10Gbps intefaces, or about the bandwidth of a loaded UCS configuration.

For perspective, you can do about 15GBps on a fully populated VMAX (which of course is usually selected less for throughput and more for transactional IOps performance and scale), and of course, on a loaded Isilon cluster, you can do 50-80GBps.

But unlike the VMAX and Isilon which are built for purpose (“tactical nukes”), the VNX is simple, efficient, powerful utility/swiss army-knife storage – used for all sorts of blended use cases.  I think that 10Gbps range is pretty impressive.   One of the reasons was the jump to 4-lane 6 SAS on the backend.   But for some customers, even that isn’t enough, and there’s still headroom in the storage processors.   So, we’re introducing the “High Bandwidth” VNX configuration.   In this configuration, the already impressive backend bandwidth is jacked up by a factor of 2x.

Then, the 25 spindle 2.5” drive tray has started shipping.   These are cool, but if you ask me, have a surprisingly limited life – at least in the way that people are thinking about them.   

Most customer look at them and go “hey SAS disks are smaller (physically) and can be less expensive, and use less power – so that’s good”.   Well, yeah.

I REALLY think that before you know it, we’ll be in all SSD configurations (SLC and MLC), with magnetic media being used for very large capacity/$/W/sqft scenarioes (for which they will exist well through 2015 – again, IMO).

So with that in mind, it’s better thought of as a “25 SSD IO eating enclosure”

But – what these new enclosures represent are tip of the iceberg for very dense SSD scenarioes.    And yes, of course we’re looking at all sorts of stuff, including ones where potentially we leverage form factors that eschew traditional flash packaging (think of how Apple used the mSATA form factor in the MacBook Air).

BUT – sometimes it’s not about IO capacity, but is about how dense the platform can be when it comes to GB/array/floor tile.

So – we also continue to expand capabilities on that front – here you can see the new 60 spindle 4U enclosure.   This enclosure was codenamed “voyager” for EMC trivia buffs.   This lets you fit 60 3.5” disks in 4U, or put another way, 600 disks in a rack, or (coupled with the new 3TB spindles) 1.8PB raw per floor tile.   That’s a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A quick “heads up” – these require a special “dense rack”.  They can be added to existing VNX systems, but not into existing VNX racks.    BTW – the majority of these dense configs literally configure the entire array that way.   Also – in case anyone is wondering about 2.5” disks – of course, we’re working on the next-gen “dense” configs.  For now, when you want dense GB configs – 2.5” disks are a bad choice, you get far more bang for your buck from 3.5” disks.

Also – there’s a pile of software updates that were announced.  Unisphere continues it’s rapid march of progress.   BTW – we’re finding many customers are selecting VNX after trying Unipshere.  Customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive (it’s not perfect, and we’ll continue to improve) .

Unisphere version 1.1 (remember from my VNX/VNXe launch posts about how the teams work together, driving innovation in a producer/consumer model to each other?) continues to get better.   VNX customers get the VNXe goodness of application-integration right in the UI itself on top of the vCenter API integration that was already there.  And yes, if you look closely, there is a VMAX tab in that Unisphere screenshot :-)

Unisphere is also getting key awesome sauce that is in EMC Replication Manager embedded directly in the platform.  EMC and NetApp have led the way amongst the storage vendors with the idea of “application-integrated” replication – EMC with Replication Manager and NetApp with the SnapManager family.

While customers dig those tools – one thing that we’ve really been focused on is making the “time to value” and overall solution simplicity better.   So – rather than just creating a Unipshere “snap-in” for Replication Manager, this project (again, for trivia buffs, this is code named “project Archway”) will EMBED the majority of those functions directly in the platform itself – making management cake.  this part is a bit of a preview of things two come.

BTW – in case you missed it, and you that no matter HOW easy we make storage management UIs like Unisphere… for the people who run the applications preference would be to NEVER LEAVE your application UIs.

Hence, the EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) which plugs into vCenter, as an example. 

The week before EMC World, we launched EMC Storage Integrator (ESI).  ESI is the equivalent of the Virtual Storage Integrator, but instead of vCenter integration (“home” for VMware admins), it integrates with the Microsoft MMC tools for Sharepoint, SQL Server and other apps.  We also announced our SCOM Pro pack.  

I’d highly recommend that any customer using any Microsoft technology (..ahem.. that means you, because it means everybody) check it out.   Like VSI, ESI is completely FREE.   You can read more about it at my colleague Adrian Simays’ site here.

Phew… Is there more?   YES!

We’ve launched the Cloud Tiering Appliance.   This enables VNX customers to take files and based on policy, to automatically extend the idea of FAST VP right out of the platform, and right out to

 

What else?   Well – we’ve integrated the VNX filesystem with API-level integration with the Google Search Appliance.   This is pretty cool – through this integration, finding your corporate info becomes much faster and easier.  

The Google search appliance doesn’t need to crawl the VNX filesystems, the VNX literally pushes the info to the appliance.  Cool.

2011 has been an EPIC year so far for EMC’s midrange and SMB customers – and… we’re only just getting started :-)

Comments

[Hoosier Storage Guy]

A week ago I was wondering what possibly could be the big announcements for EMC World - EMC announced too much earlier in the year and didn't leave anything for the conference. I'm glad to say I stand corrected. Congrats on keeping the lid on Project Lightning so well. Plus, the VNX specific goodies are looking good. Still waiting on a few key things though, smaller auto-tiering chunk sizes and mixed RAID types within a storage pool come to mind.

[Wama]

Hi,
Great POST!!!
Any details about the Cloud Tiering Appliance?
Availability? Interoperability? Scalability?

Thanks.
Wama.

[Dejan Ilic]

Is the cloud integration completely transparent to the file-owners?
Do you still keep the files deduped and compressed in the cloud?
Are any of these cloud storage providers EU based (needed due to legal resons)?

[Erik]

I find it a bit strange that there is still no offering of the new Seagate 900GB 2,5" 10k disks with VNX. 25*900GB 10k in 2U.. now that's consolidation with speed intact.

[Rover Ysea]

VMX I see many improvements over the 2.5-inch disk.

I had hoped that the EMC World gave the announcement of the 2.5-inch drives for the VMAX. For this is a dust has with IBM and Hitachi storage.