EMC Corporation has announced a quantum leap forward in its enterprise storage strategy with major additions to the industry’s leading all-flash storage solutions to address mixed, consolidated and the world’s most performance-intensive enterprise workloads.
Complementing the industry-leading XtremIO all-flash array, today’s announcement of EMC’s flagship VMAX® All Flash® enterprise data services platform and EMC® DSSD™ D5™ Rack-Scale Flash solution (see related news releases linked above) underscores EMC’s commitment to all-flash arrays for primary storage.
EMC’s flash portfolio is designed to address virtually any enterprise data center use case, enabling the Modern Data Center. By 2020, EMC estimates that all storage used for production applications will be flash-based; traditional disk will primarily be used for bulk and archive storage only.
EMC’s all-flash portfolio is purpose-built to address virtually any enterprise data center use case:
More than just improving on raw performance, VMAX All Flash arrays deliver the legendary reliability and flexibility of the VMAX platform, while offering total cost of ownership (TCO) less than traditional enterprise disk-based arrays. 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. In addition to a dramatically simplified management experience, its appliance-like packaging now includes both hardware and software.
VMAX All Flash is engineered specifically to capitalize 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.
DSSD D5 delivers ultra-dense, high-performance, highly available and very low latency shared flash storage for up to 48 redundant connected servers. D5 is connected to each node through PCIe Gen3 and leverages NVMe technology, to deliver the performance of PCI-attached flash. D5 is a standalone appliance that is disaggregated from compute, delivering the benefits of shared storage. The result is next-generation performance with latency as low as 100 microseconds, throughput as high as 100 GB/s, and IOPS of up to 10 million in a 5U system.
The ultra-high performance D5 was developed from the ground up and packaged with multiple industry-first hardware and software innovations that set it apart from any other storage offering available on the market. DSSD D5 moves beyond storage into the realm of enabling next-generation applications that require extreme performance and scalability. Designed to meet the demands of the high-performance, data-intensive workloads of tomorrow, D5 also delivers a crucial link to emerging next-generation applications based on extremely large, fast-growing working sets with 100 percent hot and active data.
DSSD D5 reduces data center footprint and costs with ultra-dense, shared flash. The appliance provides up to 36 flash modules with 144TB RAW (100TB usable) capacity, in a five rack-unit chassis that can be accessed redundantly by up to 48 direct-attached servers. D5 is also engineered to provide increased application uptime through enterprise-class availability and serviceability features. These features include dual-ported client cards, dual H/A controllers, redundant components and industry-leading flash reliability and resiliency with Cubic RAID™, dynamic wear leveling, flash physics control and space-time garbage collection.
Higher flash drive density, lower failure rates, lower power consumption and operating temperatures relative to traditional disk arrays also contribute to enterprise storage platforms that require less data center floor space, power and cooling.
According to IDC’s most recent Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker2, EMC is the market share leader in all-flash storage solutions at 39%, more than the next three competitors combined and is also the market share leader in enterprise storage solutions that include both all-flash and hybrid flash storage arrays. EMC storage solutions based on hybrid configurations will be offered primarily for bulk data storage capacity and archive requirements.
EMC Executive Quote:
Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solution, India and SAARC at EMC
“Today’s enterprise customer wants to enable their business with modern data centers that deliver agility, efficiency and speed. We’re expanding upon EMC’s primary storage strengths and all-flash leadership, built with XtremIO. With the introduction of VMAX All Flash and DSSD D5 there is virtually no data center use case we’re unable to address from traditional high-end enterprise workloads, to use cases that people haven’t even dreamt about in the data center of tomorrow.”
