EMC Revamps VNX For Flash Storage

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EMC today introduced new products for its VNX series of midrange storage. (Photo: EMC)

EMC announced technology advances in the EMC VNX line of midrange storage, new capabilities for the EMC VSPEX, and the upcoming general availability of a new Software-Defined Storage platform. EMC also previewed "Project Nile", a commercially-available complete, Web-scale storage infrastructure for the data center.

“Customers are demanding more performance and efficiency from their current data center infrastructure while, at the same time, deploying new architectures for their next generation mobile and Web applications," said EMC President and Chief Operating Officer David Goulden. "By fully embracing and exploiting disruptive technologies such as Intel MultiCore, virtualization and flash, EMC is providing customers with the products and solutions they need to help transform their IT department–not only delivering unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency but also providing the agility needed for their business to remain competitive. ”

EMC announced a new selection of mid range VNX unified storage systems targeting application performance, storage efficiency, data protection, data availability and ease-of-use: VNX5200, VNX5400, VNX5600, VNX5800, VNX7600, VNX8000 and VNX-F. Through new MCx software the new VNX fully unleashes the power of flash, accelerating application and file performance by up-to four times. EMC has a number of videos of partners and customers talking about their experience with EMC VNX here.

“The midrange market faces some serious challenges, among them being incredible growth, increasing management complexity, pressures to remain competitive, and budgets that rarely grow," said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, Storage at IDC. "Customers require technologies that squeeze every last drop of value out of their assets in both physical and virtual environments - and for their sake they better have flash technology as part of their plan. In keeping with its track record in the storage market, EMC has delivered a new storage platform that presents a fundamental change to how midrange storage customers can make the most out of flash within their arrays - compounded with a totally new level of price and performance that the midrange storage market has not witnessed before.”

A new flash-only VNX configuration (VNX-F) is also now available for environments demanding higher performance at lower latency for long periods of time. VNX-F delivers consistent high performance at lower latency compared to all disk or hybrid versions of the VNX. New EMC XtremSW Cache 2.0 software offers deeper integration with EMC arrays including the new VNX Series—further driving down latency by 65 percent.

EMC announced that the ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform is planned to be generally available later this month. ViPR is scheduled to include both the ViPR Controller and ViPR Object Data Services. ViPR Object Data Services gives customers the ability to view objects as files, providing file access performance without the latency inherent in current object storage models. ViPR-supported storage includes the new EMC VNX unified storage platform as well existing EMC VNX, EMC VMAX, EMC VPLEX, EMC Isilon, EMC RecoverPoint and third-party arrays including NetApp storage. ViPR provides the foundation for building Web-scale data centers without the need to hire thousands of technical experts to create a custom environment.

"Cisco and EMC have partnered closely to deliver three paths to speed our customers' journey to the cloud:  custom-designed infrastructure, validated reference architectures via EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and pre-integrated converged infrastructure with VCE Vblock Systems," said Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Data Center Group at Cisco. "Over the past year, Cisco solutions integrated with offerings from EMC and VCE have generated significant momentum with customers and partners.  Today, Cisco and EMC have hundreds of joint channel partners and thousands of joint customers around the world.  Together, Cisco and EMC plan to accelerate this success with our mutual channel partners.  We also believe that EMC's next-generation VNX technology will complement Cisco's Unified Compute and Unified Fabric solutions, helping customers maximize their existing infrastructure and further simplify cloud deployments."

"Today is a significant milestone in EMC’s vision to deliver customers - both large enterprises and service providers - the foundation on which to build a Web-scale data center capable of growing to tens and hundreds of petabytes of information," said Amitabh Srivastava, President, Advanced Software Division at EMC.  "By delivering ViPR ahead of industry expectations, we will provide our customers with a lightweight, software-only approach to storage management and a foundation for next generation applications. This approach not only solves the problems they face today, but provides a path to the future.”