At the beginning of this year, EMC announced over 40 new storage products and enhancements. Among these, a great deal of attention was focused on the new VNX and its smaller sibling, the VNXe.
The VNX brought together the traditional CLARiiON and Celerra storage arrays into a single, unified platform: more powerful and far easier to use than its predecessors. The VNXe was a strategic foray into what we saw as an under-served market: storage for the IT generalist: the VNXe takes simplicity and cost-effectiveness to new levels in this important market segment.
That was then, what about now?
On the tail of EMC’s positive Q3 earnings results, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into what was going on in this important storage segment: how were the existing products doing, and what was new in this space?
And there ended being a lot to talk about ….
Meet Eric Herzog
Eric joined EMC not too long ago, but it feels like he’s been here forever . As VP of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC’s Unified Storage Division (USD), he’s been a blast to work with.
You can’t imagine anyone more passionate about EMC’s products, partners and customers. Keeping up with him means keeping your iPhone turned on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. An hour with Eric is like a few hours with most anyone else – it can be a bit exhausting. He can be intense – even by EMC standards.
Not surprisingly, Eric is justifiably proud of the achievements made by the EMC team during 2011. He likes to start with a few quotes from the recent EMC Q3 earnings call.
Understandably, we don’t provide fine-grained data on how each part of the EMC portfolio is doing, but there were some big clues as to how the management team felt about VNX and VNXe performance in perhaps the most competitive segment of the storage market.
Being a long-time EMC watcher, this is about as exuberant as it gets during an EMC earnings call :)
In a nutshell: we’re seeing strong category growth year-over-year, we’re seeing a faster-than-usual transition to the new products than we otherwise would expect, the VNXe is achieving its stated goal of introducing a new class of customers to EMC, we’re seeing strong adoption of our differentiated technologies around flash and FAST – and we’ve doubled the number of channel partners over the year.
The accolades go further.
In VMware environments, EMC (and VNX) have emerged as the #1 storage choice. Computer Reseller News awarded the VNXe “Most Innovative Storage Technology” for 2011. EMC storage products were responsible for a “clean sweep” at the recent CRN ARC awards.
And EMC emerged as the #1 choice for demanding storage workloads of all types, according to the recent IDC Storage User Demand Survey. That, and there’s no shortage of glowing stories from EMC customers – new and old, large and small – who think we’ve done a really good job with the VNX and VNXe.
Neat stuff, but we’re not one to rest on our laurels. As I mentioned before, this particular segment is incredibly competitive, and what makes you successful one year is no guarantee of success in the future.
Recent Product Updates From The Team
At the recent VMworld in Copenhagen, the USD team rolled out three new variations of the VNX.
One is a configuration optimized for high-bandwidth.
From my perspective, the new bandwidth-optimized models compare very favorably in terms of price/performance as compared with niche products from smaller vendors.
However, in this case, since it’s a VNX it has access to all the VNX functionality if needed – it’s a very feature-rich set of capabilities. Not to mention, it’s sold and supported by EMC :)
The high-end VNX7500 configurations can support up to 14GB/sec throughput. And the smaller VNX5500 now has extra back-end 6Gb/sec controllers, yielding a 50% bandwidth bump to 6.5 Gb/sec.
All good. Why is this important?
There’s a hard core of applications out there that are completely dependent on block-oriented bandwidth: the more, the better. And now we have a great offering for them to seriously consider.
Another variant announced was a high-density configuration of the VNX.
The drives are current, including the new NL-SAS 3TB drive.
The shelves are different; using a top-loading approach, we can now cram 60 drives into a 4U space.
And the racking is different as well, they’re now 5” deeper.
For customers looking to pack as much capacity as humanly possible into the smallest space possible, there’s a new density standard to consider: 1.6 petabytes per rack.
And we’re not talking some de-featured dumb array here: it’s still a full VNX – all the power, all the features, all the simplicity: sold and supported by EMC.
My favorite of the bunch?
The new all-flash version of the VNX – the VNX 5500-F.
Yes, An All-Flash Version of the VNX
The use case here is simple: customer has a critical application where uniform speed is imperative.
While dropping in a modern VNX with FAST Cache and/or FAST VP will deliver an eye-popping performance improvement, some people need even more. And that’s where the VNX 5500-F comes in.
At first glance, it might not look like big news: all that is really is different is your choice of 21 100GB or 200GB SLC drives, yielding approximately 2TB or 4TB.
But what you might miss is the fact that it’s a full VNX: with enterprise-class data protection, powerful replication, simplified management, and so on.
It can grow one of two ways. First, customers can add more flash drives if they like – no surprise.
More importantly, they can grow capacity with traditional disk drives, and the VNX’s FAST Cache and FAST VP capabilities will make the most of the flash storage that’s already in the configuration.
To the best of my knowledge, there’s no other all-flash array that can do this today.
A Chat With Eric
I wanted to ask Eric to provide some color behind the recent announcements. Here are my questions – and his responses.
Eric, congratulations on phenomenal results with the VNX and VNXe – it’s a heck of an achievement. You spend a lot of time with customers – what do they see in the VNX and VNXe that they really like?
Customers are telling us that it is all about the application. Storage companies, historically, have focused on bandwidth and IOPS and application integration and centricity were not that important.
But at EMC we listed to what our customers wanted – better application performance, functionality, ease of use, unified solutions that can deliver both block and file, and virtualization optimization – be that server virtualization or VDI.
The VNX family has delivered on those needs and more. From SMB's through the mid-range and up to global enterprises the VNX family is delivering the application optimization, performance, and data services they need to be up and running at all times.
I also know you’re spending a lot of time with partners, and we’re doing well there as well. What do you see making the VNX and VNXe so attractive to partners?
From a channel partner perspective, the VNX and VNXe provide the right product for the right jobs. Ranging from standard enterprise deployments to remote office to vertical applications, channel partners see innovative solutions with the VNX and VNXe.
At the same time, our channel partner programs and support, as recognized with the CRN ARC award – by the way did you know that isn't the editors it is a vote of channel partners – are giving partners the tools and services they need to deliver the best solutions to their customers.
Today for the channel it is all about software, services, and the cloud and with the VNX and VNXe resellers get the solutions, support, and services that make them look great with their end customers.
We both know there are vendors out there trying to convince customers that you don’t really need flash drives in an array, just lots of read cache. How is that playing out in the real world?
As noted by numerous customers that have implemented our flash technology together with our Fully Automated Storage Tiering Suite (FAST) and talked about it publicly, the need for full SSD-based cache – both read and write – as well as using SSD's as a replacement for some of their disk drive tier is well documented.
The New York Stock Exchange's new financial services cloud runs on VNX with FAST, the largest tier and wheel distributor in North America – American Tire – used SSD and Flash for their virtualized and private cloud environment, and the Fulham Premier Soccer League club in the UK leverage SSD, FAST, and Unified storage for their private cloud and security systems.
Just a small sample of customers who have publicly said leveraging flash and FAST delivers.
We all thought that UniSphere was going to be a big deal for customers when it came to market. What’s been the customer reaction so far?
It is all about management and ease of that management. Customer reaction has been outstanding. Having a single management console for file and block dramatically shortens storage management cycles, meaning ROI and effective use of IT manpower resources.
Additionally, our virtualization and Window integration products – VSI and WSI – make application management of storage simple and easy in VMWare and Windows deployments.
Unless you’ve met with certain customers, you might not appreciate why cramming 1.6 petabytes in a floor tile might be a big deal. Can you explain a bit about who these customers are, and what they’re looking for?
You can't pick up an IT publication, website, or blog these days that doesn't lament the crowding of the data center. For those in the mix, it is all about space, cooling and time old adage of "watts and slots".
The high density VNX addresses that. Allowing the optimization of floor space, watts, slots, and cooling all in a simple, easy package in ONE FRAME. Now that is helping out customers.
Personally, I’m intrigued by the all-flash VNX. I’ve met with customers who need to dramatically spike performance for a few key applications. Is that what you’re seeing?
Customers still need enterprise storage, they just need it to run a lot faster these days - high velocity trading, database demands, and cloud deployments all samples of the need for speed. FAST will take you a lot of the way there, but – of course – nothing compares with an all–flash array.
At the same time, customers still want the reliability, data services, scalability, data protection, and comprehensive (yet easy to use) management the VNX is known for. Just having speed is good, but without those enterprise features the data they want to move quickly could be exposed and that is not what they want.
Speed+Enterprise feature sets – that is the VNX-F, giving them the best of both worlds.
2011 has been a big year for you and your product group. I know you can’t pre-announce anything, but any hints you’d like to share about what’s ahead?
Well, we have stated our Lightning flash product is in early customer test so I think we can safely say you'll see integration with this and the VNX family in 2012. Beyond that, the BEST is yet to come. Lots more innovation coming in 2012 -- stay tuned!
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