EMC today announced comprehensive updates across its VMAX family of enterprise storage arrays, including a new version of EMC’s Enginuity software and a number of upgrades for the VMAX 10K that improve performance in virtualized environments and incorporate features previously only available on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K. According to EMC, this suite of updates makes the VMAX 10K twice as powerful as its predecessor as well as the highest-performing solution of its class in the industry.
EMC today announced comprehensive updates across its VMAX family of enterprise storage arrays, including a new version of EMC’s Enginuity software and a number of upgrades for the VMAX 10K that improve performance in virtualized environments and incorporate features previously only available on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K. According to EMC, this suite of updates makes the VMAX 10K twice as powerful as its predecessor as well as the highest-performing solution of its class in the industry.
30% of EMC’s VMAX 10K sales in the third quarter of 2012 were customers new to the VMAX family, emphasizing the important role that the VMAX 10K plays as a gateway to the rest of the VMAX portfolio. The new updates are intended to make the VMAX 10K more attractive to small to mid-size enterprises looking to consolidate existing infrastructure or deploy virtualized hybrid clouds. VMAX also features improved VMware integration including vCenter storage provisioning and better-optimized load balancing at the VM level.
VMAX 10K Enhancements
Updates to the VMAX 10K focus on increased performance in virtualized environments, including platform support for faster CPUs with more cores. Data At Rest Encryption (D@RE), previously only available on the VMAX 20K and VMAX 40K, can encrypt all data on all drive types without performance penalty. EMC’s Federated Tiered Storage technology, which powers an additional tier of storage that can include non-EMC arrays, has also been added to the VMAX 10K.
VMAX Family Enhancements
Updates to EMC’s Unisphere management for VMAX provide enhanced integration with VMware, VFCache, and Windows 2012. The new Host I/O Limits feature for VMAX makes performance more predictable and easier to manage in consolidation and multi-tenancy environments, where customers can now allocate IOPS and bandwidth by application or user.
Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) automatically optimizes performance in a tiered environment to maximize flash utilization for high-IOPS workloads and maximize SATA hard drive utilization for capacity-intensive applications. The VMAX family now supports up to four FAST VP tiers with cold data compression. New support for 2.5-inch drives for the VMAX 10K and VMAX 40K enables twice as many drives per tile while reducing weight and power consumption. According to EMC, the updated VMAX 40K can now exceed 2 million IOPS with VMware vSphere 5.
Availability
EMC’s updated VMAX solutions, including the VMAX 10K, are now available worldwide.