Today EMC Corporation declared 2016 the year of all flash for primary storage. And more than just being a nifty marketing slogan, EMC is delivering several updates to its all-flash storage portfolio, including what it is calling a “quantum leap forward” in its VMAX, flagship enterprise storage platform. The new EMC VMAX All Flash is the first all-flash storage array to natively support block, file, open systems and mainframe with the ability to scale up to 4PB of data. EMC is going beyond just adding performance by going all flash, they are also extending all of the data services customers have come to expect to the new all flash version.
Today EMC Corporation declared 2016 the year of all flash for primary storage. And more than just being a nifty marketing slogan, EMC is delivering several updates to its all-flash storage portfolio, including what it is calling a “quantum leap forward” in its VMAX, flagship enterprise storage platform. The new EMC VMAX All Flash is the first all-flash storage array to natively support block, file, open systems and mainframe with the ability to scale up to 4PB of data. EMC is going beyond just adding performance by going all flash, they are also extending all of the data services customers have come to expect to the new all flash version.
As we’ve pointed out a time or two, flash is way faster than spinning disk. In fact flash can be 100 times faster than spinning disk. And over the past few years the main barrier to adopting flash, price, has been coming down. While a big performance bump could be the only thing EMC did to its VMAX, it went beyond to complete re-engineer the VMAX and now offers it in two all-flash models: EMC VMAX 450 and EMC VMAX 850. These new models have been engineered to take full advantage of the performance and density that is unique to flash.
The new all-flash VMAX models can also be scaled by purchasing V-Bricks. V-Bricks contains one VMAX engine each and starts with 53TB of usable capacity. The VMAX All Flash 450 can be configured to include one to four V-Bricks and the VMAX All Flash 850 up to eight V-Bricks. This means customers can start off smaller and scale performance and ports easily by adding additional V-Bricks. Customers can also scale-up using 13TB Usable Flash Capacity Packs.
Both the VMAX All Flash 450 and VMAX All Flash 850 leverage the world-class data services of the VMAX family and come with a choice of software bundles. The base-level F package includes:
- Thin Provisioning
- QoS
- Embedded Unisphere
- VVols support and SnapVX
- AppSync to address Copy Data Management (CDM) needs
For customers who want a fuller portfolio of native data services, the FX package also includes:
- The complete suite of EMC SRDF software for replication
- EMC ViPR Suite (both Controller and SRM) for Software-Defined automated provisioning, management, and monitoring
- EMC CloudArray software to link non-critical data between VMAX and cloud storage services
- EMC eNAS for file storage
- The newly launched EMC Unisphere 360 for simple, consolidated storage management of up to 200 VMAX arrays in a single datacenter
Other benefits that apply to all models of the VMAX All Flash are EMC’s ProtectPoint that performs direct backup between VMAX and Data Domain protection storage, without the need for traditional backup infrastructure. And the Xpect More Program, EMC’s lifetime flat-price maintenance model, which planning, deploying, and managing VMAX All Flash much easier while improving TCO.
On the performance side of things, EMC claims that VMAX All Flash can deliver millions of IOPS and sustains under 1millisecond of latency for read/write workloads while supporting up to 150GB/s of bandwidth. This performance can support the most mission-critical systems and applications. VMAX All Flash also supports several applications including: Oracle, VMware, Microsoft and OpenStack.
Availability
The EMC VMAX All Flash, in both the EMC VMAX 450 and EMC VMAX 850, is available now. EMC also stated that it will add inline compression as a free upgrade in the second half of 2016.
