EMC Corporation has introduced new additions to its portfolio designed to enable Indian businesses to take the leap towards a modern data center, with all-flash, hyperconverged, high-performance and software-designed storage solutions delivered as appliances for flexible and agile deployment in environments and workloads of all sizes.
Enterprises are striding fast towards solutions, which offer easy alignment with the legacy systems and offer security, simplicity flexibility and scalability. In India over 3100 digitally native startups are well-placed to address this shift by leveraging SMAC, IoT, automation and other new technologies, to disrupt traditional industries.
In last 15 years of Information Technology, we have seen major investments in infrastructure leading upto around USD 2.7 trillion in the year 2015. However, with an ever increasing amount of data, the CIOs today have the dilemma to drive out cost and at the same time innovate new strategic business imperatives and applications.
It is important to develop consumer grade mobile apps along with an optimization of investment. There comes the importance of modernizing the data centres around the 4 key pillars- leverage flash as a core storage infrastructure, the ability to scale out, taking the software defined approach and movement to cloud.
All-Flash Offerings: VMAX for reliability and flexibility
The new 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. More than just improving raw performance, VMAX All Flash arrays build on the legendary reliability and flexibility of the VMAX platform. Recognized by customers as the most-trusted storage array in the industry, EMC is extending the world-class VMAX data services to VMAX All Flash, complete with a dramatically simplified management experience. Its appliance-based packaging now includes both hardware and software and its maintenance pricing is flat for the life of the array.
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. EMC intends to non-disruptively add in-line compression to VMAX in the second half of 2016 to gain further efficiencies in capacity.
Rack-Scale Flash: DSSD D5 for extreme performance
We believe DSSD is a new category of storage ideally suited to the new world of analytics and in-memory databases. This is the world’s first and only “Rack-Scale Flash” offering!
DSSD D5 is the first of a new category of flash storage – Rack-Scale Flash. DSSD D5 is designed for the most data-intensive applications, both traditional and next-generation, which require extreme levels of performance and the lowest possible latency. DSSD D5 reaches new performance heights, with real-world results that speed applications such as genetic sequencing calculations, fraud detection, credit card authorization, and advanced analytics by as much as 10X.
EMC offers DSSD D5 to benefit organizations across diverse industries currently limited by traditional architectures that were not designed for the extreme performance needs of their business critical applications. These include applications built on top of Hadoop, high performance databases and data warehouses as well as custom applications used for complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight.
These new additions to our already powerful flash portfolio promise to make 2016 “The Year Of All Flash For Primary Storage.”
Why Is This Important?
Data volumes are continuing to increase while businesses are under pressure to process that data in a timely fashion. Processing power has steadily increased according to Moore’s Law, doubling every couple of years. But storage has not kept up–until the advent of flash (or solid-state drives) several years ago.
Today, flash has reached the point where it is more cost-effective to deploy than high performance hard drives. We knew this day would come and have worked tirelessly over the past year to optimize the VMAX for all-flash deployments while still providing the world-class data services our customers know and love. This enables organizations to modernize their data center infrastructure and seamlessly run their mission critical applications at a speed and a price point unimaginable several years ago.
But the story doesn’t end there. The biggest challenge facing most of our customers today is one of digital transformation. The world’s leading companies are moving quickly to modernize their businesses by taking their services online or creating smart devices to participate in the burgeoning “Internet Of Things.” We believe companies will collect 1000x more data than ever before and will be under pressure to analyze that data in real time to seek competitive advantage. These new requirements break traditional infrastructure and pave the way for a new approach. This is why we created DSSD D5.
D5 is fast. How fast? Fast enough to analyze an entire day’s worth of stock market data. Fast enough to stop fraudulent credit card transactions dead in their tracks. Fast enough to examine aircraft engine data during maintenance windows so planes can fly farther, longer, and safer. Fast enough for businesses not to miss a revenue opportunity because their infrastructure couldn’t keep up with their business. Fast enough to perform genomic sequencing on cancer cells to identify the right cancer treatment the first time, in no time. Fast enough to save lives.
Why Go “All Flash For Primary Storage” Now?
It’s very simple. Offering all flash arrays for the majority of data center use cases simply makes economic sense. We’ve reached the point where it costs less to store data entirely on flash rather than performance hard drives. We have a market leading all-flash portfolio.
At the high end we have XtremIO, which had a record year in 2015, selling well in excess of $1BN in only its second year in the market. To complement XtremIO, we now have the VMAX All-Flash providing huge scale in terms of capacity, ports and devices, world-class data services and support for file, mainframe, and i-Series environments. In the mid-range, we continue to offer VNX in all-flash configurations for general-purpose mixed block and file workloads. Between XtremIO, VMAX All Flash, and VNX, there should be no data center use case we cannot handle!
Can I Get It In Converged?
There’s no better way to modernize a data center than through converged infrastructure. We will be offering VMAX All Flash in the VCE Vblock 740, and DSSD D5 will be incorporated into the VCE converged infrastructure portfolio in the future.
Converged Infrastructure: VCE Vblock for all-flash infrastructure
EMC is also expanding its industry-leading converged infrastructure portfolio to capitalize on the latest all-flash technology. The VCE Vblock System 740 is immediately orderable with VMAX All Flash, providing additional options for customers looking to architect a modern data center with an all-flash converged infrastructure. In addition, the VMAX All Flash is orderable as a VCE Technology Extension to existing Vblock Systems and VCE Vscale Fabric implementations and will be generally available later this year, providing customers with a simple, assured path to significantly extend the performance and capabilities of their VCE-based data centers.
Hyperconverged Appliance: VxRail for small and medium businesses, enterprise regional offices and end-user computing
Hyper-Converged infrastructure is one of the most rapidly-growing methods for deploying IT in the data center, as IT departments seek ways to adjust to their new role in business and new responsibilities entrusted on them. This market is growing at 60% YoY, as per analysts expected to touch USD 4Bn+ by 2020. Gartner expects it to go to a $5 billion market by 2019, becoming the category leader by revenue in pre-integrated full-stack infrastructure products.
The VxRail Appliance family brings together the best of EMC and VMware including EMC rich data services and leading systems management capabilities with VMware’s leading hyper-converged software that includes VMware vSphere®, vCenter Server® and VMware Virtual SAN™, the simple, powerful, efficient software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere – all in a single product family with one point of support. Hybrid storage or all-flash VxRail Appliances extend and simplify VMware customer environments and deliver key performance and capacity advantages in a simple, turnkey and easily scalable HCIA.
The jointly engineered VCE VxRail Appliances tightly integrate virtualization, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. Organizations can start small, with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and easily and non-disruptively scale to thousands of VMs with a predictable, “pay-as-you-grow” approach.
