New EMC VMAX Enterprise Storage Family Accelerates Transformation to the Hybrid Cloud

EMC VMAX Family Gets More Powerful, More Trusted, and Smarter with Significant New Platform Enhancements; New VMAX 40K Enterprise Storage System Delivers Up to 3X Performance and More than 2X Usable Capacity than Any Other Offering in the Industry

At EMC World 2012, EMC (NYSE:EMC) today announced the new EMC VMAX Family, consisting of the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and the newest member of the family, the VMAX 40K. The new EMC VMAX Family   is a comprehensive lineup of enterprise storage arrays, all built upon the industry-leading Virtual Matrix Architecture first introduced in April 2009. Complementing the new EMC VMAX Family is a host of new software capabilities that streamline operations and extend the market-proven VMAX to new hosts and applications, while integrating customers’ existing storage assets into an integrated and unified pool of storage resources. Combined, the scalable EMC VMAX Family offers the most powerful, most trusted, smartest and most efficient enterprise information infrastructure for deploying Hybrid Clouds.

The EMC VMAX Family is anchored by the new VMAX 40K, a revolutionary new product that establishes new maximums for performance, capacity and scale in the enterprise storage market. Delivering as much as 3X more performance and 2X the usable capacity of any other enterprise storage product, the VMAX 40K is optimized to support hyper-consolidation of the world’s most demanding big data, transaction processing, analytics and cloud computing applications.

Customers are increasingly moving toward a Hybrid Cloud model—which delivers the flexibility and choice to store and serve information within the cloud, while maintaining control over their mission critical applications. The Hybrid Cloud is delivering customers the opportunity to run their businesses smarter and more efficiently. The new EMC VMAX Family, and enhancements to Enginuity, are purpose-built to be the foundation for enterprises of all sizes as they transform their IT environments to take advantage of the Hybrid Cloud.

With today’s announcement EMC is delivering:

More Powerful

• Leveraging up to 32 2.8GHz Intel® Xeon® 6-core processors, as much as 2TB of mirrored (1TB usable) and ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM, and twice as much internal fabric bandwidth as the original EMC VMAX, the new VMAX 40K delivers unmatched levels of performance and scale. With more than 3X the sustained cache-miss bandwidth and 2X the total IOPS than any competing array, the EMC VMAX 40K is truly in a class of its own.
• VMAX 40K supports up to 4PB of usable capacity, 2X the VMAX 20K’s 2PB usable and nearly 3X the 1.5PB usable capacity of the VMAX 10K. The new High Density option for the VMAX 40K utilizes 2.5” SAS drives to support up to 3.2PBu in a footprint that is a 1/3 smaller and uses 1/3 less power than the equivalent configuration using 3.5” drives.
• New 2.5” eMLC (Multi-Level Cell) Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) deliver the performance, reliability and life expectancy of SLC-based EFDs, at a lower price than comparable 3.5” SLC EFDs. Available initially only on VMAX 40K high-density configurations, these new eMLC EFDs allow customers to build FAST VP configurations that cost-effectively utilize more Flash and more nearline capacity to improve both $/GB and $/IOPS.

More Trusted

• Federated Tiered Storage (FTS) provides active data integrity checking on all data in external arrays to protect against silent data corruption. Such corruption can occur in arrays that do not provide integrity validation of their own. EMC VMAX and EMC VNX families natively implement stringent integrity assurances—functionality that is exclusive to EMC.
• FAST hinting to remote replica devices ensures proper data layout for optimal performance in the event of a fail-over / fail-back event—functionality that is exclusive to EMC.
• EMC RecoverPoint for EMC VMAX delivers enterprise-class heterogeneous local and remote replication of EMC VMAX with point-in-time recovery. This provides the flexibility to replicate to/from heterogeneous storage combined with point-in-time recovery for the entire EMC VMAX Family—as well as EMC VPLEX virtual storage (see related news). This functionality is exclusive to EMC.

Smarter

• The new Federated Tiered Storage enables customers to consolidate and simplify management and operations of their disparate storage assets. By putting heterogeneous storage arrays behind EMC VMAX, customers can now use trusted Symmetrix SRDF and TimeFinder software for business continuity, FAST VP for improved performance, and others to extend the life and value of existing storage arrays in the data center.
• FAST VP for mainframe count-key data (CKD) volumes, affording the performance, economic and scale benefits of FAST VP to mainframe-based workloads and applications.
• Virtual Provisioning and FAST VP for IBM i (D910 formatted devices)—prior limited to scaling performance with only 15K rpm devices, EMC VMAX is the first storage platform to bring the benefits of thin provisioning and automated tiering to IBM i customers. This functionality is exclusive to EMC.
• The latest version of EMC ProSphere® delivers the ability to manage storage, server and network resources through a single pane of glass. ProSphere now reports on host capacity use by FAST policy to enhance reporting in FAST VP environments. ProSphere will also show external capacity imported through FTS providing a single management console for analyzing and reporting on all capacity consumed across the data center including VMAX and external federated capacity.

More Efficient

• The new Unisphere for EMC VMAX is an advanced management interface that simplifies and streamlines storage operations and management while providing a common look and experience across the entire EMC VMAX Family as well as EMC VNX Family, EMC VPLEX, and RecoverPoint products. Unisphere for EMC VMAX is easier, faster, and more intuitive, while providing EMC VMAX administrators with comprehensive real-time utilization and performance monitoring.
• New ProSphere integrated support for FAST VP utilization monitoring and policy-based charge-back—functionality that is exclusive to EMC.

All of these new products, features and capabilities are shipping now and will be introduced to EMC World attendees through a combination of keynote addresses, engineering-led product sessions, trade show demonstrations and hands-on Labs running on EMC’s Demo Cloud.