By Mark Davison at EMC in London – The strategic decision by EMC to adopt all-flash for its primary storage solutions will ably equip the company to deal with the demands of what is now being termed The Fourth Industrial Revolution, says the company’s CEO, David Goulden.
Goulden explains that while the first Industrial Revolution was around harnessing the power of water and steam; the second heralded the use of electricity; and the third was about electronics and IT, the world is now about to enter a new, fourth Industrial Revolution.
“Today, we are on the threshold of this fourth revolution,” Goulden says. “The emergence of trends such as big data and the Internet of Things has ushered in an abundance of granulised data … a new society.
“So how do we prepare for this? And how do our customers prepare for this?” he asks.
He says that Moore’s Law will continue to drive the industry. “In 15 years’ time there will be an abundance of computing power thousands of times more powerful than today,” he says. “And we need to be able to handle this.
“Today’s business requirements have never been more clear,” Goulden adds. “Businesses want to be agile, they want maximum efficiency, and they have a need for speed. These are the three key requirements of every modern business.
“And to accommodate this, there are four pillars that have to be in place: flash; a cloud environment; the ability to scale out; and software-defined solutions,” he says. “Which brings us to today’s announcements which build on these pillars and which, for EMC and the industry, mark a quantum leap.”
Central to EMC’s new all-flash strategy is Vmax All Flash the first-to-market all-flash storage array to natively support block, file, open systems and mainframe with the ability to scale up to four petabytes (PB) of data.
Available immediately, EMC’s flagship Vmax array has been re-engineered to offer two new all-flash models: the EMC Vmax 450 and EMC Vmax 850. Both models are specifically designed to take full advantage of the superior performance, density and economies of scale offered by cutting-edge flash storage media. In addition, EMC will add improvements later in the year to compress data in real time, which will result in significant capacity efficiencies.
The company says Vmax All Flash is engineered specifically to capitalise on the performance of flash and the economics of today’s latest large-capacity SSDs, introducing technology such as Write Folding that improves flash durability while simultaneously delivering peak performance. Multi-dimensional scalability is achieved through its V-Brick ‘building block’ architecture. Each V-Brick contains one Vmax engine and starts with 53TB of usable capacity that can be scaled up to 500TB in 13TB increments. Multiple V-Bricks can be combined to scale out to a maximum of eight Vmax engines and 4PB. 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, allowing customers to scale-out performance and ports easily.
Goulden says that EMC is extending its Xpect More Program to offer customers simplified planning, deployment and management for the new Vmax All Flash array. The Xpect More Program offers the unique combination of a lifetime flat-price maintenance model and lifetime flash endurance protection. This not only removes many typical barriers to adoption of new technologies, it gives customers the ability to plan future procurement in a more predictable and efficient manner.
Both the Vmax All Flash 450 and Vmax All Flash 850 leverage the world-class data services of the Vmax family and come in two appliance-like package offerings. The base-level F package includes:
• Thin Provisioning
• QoS
• Embedded Unisphere
• VVols support and SnapVXTM technology
• AppSync data protection software to address Copy Data Management (CDM) needs
For customers who require a broader range of native data services, the FX package also includes:
• The complete suite of EMC SRDF software for remote replication
• Controller-based Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE)
• 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 technology for file storage
• The newly launched EMC Unisphere 360 for simple, consolidated storage management of up to 200 Vmax arrays in a single data centre
