EMC World 2015 Recap

In case you weren’t one of the lucky few (14,000+ people from 99 countries) to attend EMC World 2015 in Las Vegas, NV, earlier this month, what follows is a brief highlight of the exciting news and announcements you may have missed!

Blocks, and Racks and Appliances, Oh My!

The first major announcement came via VCE (now a division of EMC): The VxRack, a new hyper-converged rack-scale system that offers data center scale capabilities with the simplicity of an appliance. In terms of scale, think massive: 4-1000 nodes, up to 38 PB of capacity and 240 million IOPS!

VxRack (Rack) will fit nicely as an option between VCE’s VBlock (Block) converged infrastructure and EMC’s VSPEX Blue (Appliance) hyper-converged infrastructure systems. The first variation to be made available will be the VxRack System 1032. It will consist of Cisco networking, Quanta servers, EMC’s ScaleIO software defined storage (SDS) and your choice of hypervisor (VMWare, KVM, Hyper-V) or even bare metal. Use cases will range from enterprise mixed workloads, everything-as-a-service (XaaS) for enterprises or service providers and web-scale applications.

Click HERE for more information.

XtremIO 4.0, aka The Beast

Next up was the announcement of the release of XtremIO 4.0, referred to as The Beast! If you haven’t heard, XtremIO is EMC’s All Flash Array (AFA) and 4.0 is the most significant release since the product went GA in November of 2013.

  • New x-brick – With this release comes the availability of the 40 TB x-brick (previous options included 5, 10 and 20 TB) and the ability to scale to 8 x-bricks in a cluster for 320 TB of raw capacity and 1.2 M mixed IOPS at <1 ms latency!! (With even average deduplication and compression rates, that’s over 1 PB of usable storage.)
  • Availability – XtremIO x-bricks now support two simultaneous SSD failures thereby increasing the overall resiliency.
  • Scale – Customers now have the ability scale out seamlessly and without downtime by adding additional x-bricks to XtremIO clusters. (Scale from 1-to-2, 2-to-4, 4-to-6 and 6-to-8 bricks.)
  • Replication – Also introduced was the native integration with EMC RecoverPoint’s data protection product, enabling asynchronous replication between primary and secondary XtremIO clusters or even the EMC VNX as a target.
  • Snapshots – Snapshot enhancements now allow for consistency groups, scheduling, Microsoft VSS integration and 256 copies for volume or group.

Click HERE to learn more about XtremIO.

VNX and VNXe

While there were no hints of a new iteration of the VNX (EMC’s Mid-tier storage offering) at EMC World, there were two interesting updates to the product family.

  • Virtual VNX – At EMC World 2014, Project Liberty was announced. This project’s goal was to provide a virtual edition of the VNX storage array. This year, the result of that project, the vVNX Community Edition, debuted. This virtual edition of the VNX software is now available for download and use. Use cases will include the ability to create test instances of VNX with storage hardware, replication testing for DR and the ability to test and demonstrate emerging VNX capabilities (VMware vVols support will be first introduced to the vVNX in a Q3 Public Beta).
  • VNXe All Flash Offering – The VNXe3200 (EMC’s entry-level unified storage array) was announced last year at EMC World. This year, it was announced that an all-flash offering of the VNXe3200 is now available.
  • A 3TB all-flash configuration with up to 75,000 IOPS at a very affordable price-point is orderable now, with 2 TB and 7 TB options coming soon. Customers will then have the capability to upgrade from an all-flash to a hybrid configuration with the addition of SAS and/or NL-SAS drives when needed.

Continue HERE for more VNX and VNXe information.

VMAX3 Enhancements

Several enhancements were announced around the VMAX3 product, EMC’s enterprise class data services platform. They include:

  • FAST.X – FAST technology provides the ability to move data across different drive types within the array to deliver service levels as defined by the service level objectives (SLOs). FAST.X technology now extends the tiering capabilities of SLOs to move workloads to external storage (XtremIO, CloudStorage, other third party arrays, etc.) based on workload requirements.
  • Active-Active Replication – Another feature for the VMAX3 to be released later this year is SRDF/Metro. SRDF/Metro will allow active-active replication and continuous availability for hosts connected to a pair of VMAX3 arrays separated by synchronous distances. This will provide stretched cluster support for VMWare and Hyper-V.
  • ViPR Controller – The ViPR Controller embedded in the VMAX3 Hypervisor Container was previewed. This will allow VMAX3 customers to automate the delivery of different classes of storage services through the ViPR Controller self-service catalog.

Continue HERE for more information around VMAX3.

Data Protection Enhancements

There were several updates for the Data Protection products in EMC’s portfolio. Here are the highlights:

  • New Data Domain Products – A 4TB entry-point version of the Data Domain 2200 model is available now for customers seeking enterprise-grade data protection at an entry-level price. An entirely new model was also introduced, the Data Domain 9500. This model scales to 1.7 PB of usable capacity (up to 86 PB of logical capacity factoring in deduplication) and has a throughput of 58 TB/hr!
  • CloudBoost – Based off the recent acquisition of Maginatics, CloudBoost allows for the extended retention of Avamar and Networker backups to cloud-based storage.
  • Spanning – Also a recent EMC acquisition, Spanning allows for the backups for born-in cloud applications including Google Apps, Salesforce, Office 365 Mail and Calendars.
  • DPSearch – Available now in the Data Protection Suite of software is DPSearch, which provides unified index, search and recovery capabilities for searching backups from both Avamar and Networker.
  • DD OS 5.6 – New Data Domain Software (DD OS 5.6) increases the performance of the Data Domain product line by up to 16%.
  • Project Falcon –Project Falcon is a preview of a virtual edition of Data Domain, enabling tremendous flexibility in deploying protection storage for many use cases. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.

Click HERE for more information about EMC’s Data Protection products.

DSSD

Last year at EMC World, EMC announced the acquisition of DSSD. This year, attendees were shown a demo of the DSSD product that is now in very limited directed availability.

You can think of DSSD as an all-flash array that operates like server memory. DSSD (based on NAND technology) is rack-scale flash storage for ultra-high performance workloads that require ultra-low latency measured in microseconds vs. milliseconds. Use cases will include in-memory databases (SAP Hana, GemFire, etc) and real-time data analytics.

Expect to hear more about this exciting product in the near future.

ScaleIO

EMC announced a free, no restrictions download for non-production use of its software-defined storage product offering ScaleIO. ScaleIO is a software-only solution that allows for the use of existing server storage as block-based storage granting organizations scalable performance and capacity. ScaleIO, as mentioned earlier, is a key element of the VCE VxRack 1032 System.

We can also expect in the future 2.0 release of ScaleIO the ability to integrate with EMC’s RecoverPoint for extending superior data protection capabilities to the software-defined storage.

Click HERE to find out more about ScaleIO.

ViPR

Last but not least, EMC announced that the ViPR Controller will be made available as open source software and will be available for download at github.com. This open source project is termed CoprHD. ViPR is a software-defined storage offering from EMC that allows for the abstraction of storage from EMC and non-EMC storage arrays into virtual storage pools and allows for self-service provisioning capabilities.

It’s important to note that EMC will continue to offer a commercial version of the ViPR Controller for sale with professional services and support contracts.

You can learn more about ViPR by clicking HERE.

That concludes the highlights of EMC World 2015. If you are interested in learning more, visit us at www.ArrayaSolutions.com to set up an appointment, or follow us on Twitter, @ArrayaSolutions, to keep up with all of the latest company and industry updates.

Arraya Insights