They said "it" couldn't be done. They said nobody else's array could do "it" – that only their array architecture could handle "it." They said all kinds of things about how "it" was going to bring the demise of Symmetrix, because Symmetrix would never do "it." Even if we could do “it,” they said we wouldn’t – but they said we can’t. But they were wrong. VERY wrong. Today EMC announced "it" is now available on VMAX. And then EMC went one better than they ever imagined – EMC took "it" further than they have been able to, even after all the (8+) years they have been shipping "it." And of course, they will try to undermine the fact that they now have DIRECT competition from another array vendor who has implemented "it" - highlighting the history of EMC bashing "it", as if that matters any more. As I have noted before, being "first" is only important until there is a second - then all that matters is which implementation is better. And so they will childishly act like first means best perpetually. Have you guess what "it" is yet? More importantly, do you know who “they” are? Read on to see what they never expected…and should have feared... surprise! Yup. THOSE guys tried to convince users that EMC would never implement what they call “array-based virtualization.” They made crazy videos featuring zombies and even Mr. T in their lame attempts to discredit EMC’s network-based virtualization approach instead of “it.” Humorous though they may have been, word is that these marketing shenanigans ultimately led to the replacement of at least one generation of their marketing organization. But the news this week isn’t simply that EMC has introduced array-based VMAX Federated Tiered Storage (a descriptive name we prefer over simple “storage virtualization” for reasons I will explain in this post). No, the news is that we’ve upped the ante on what it means to leverage external capacity “behind” an array, in several key ways: Federated Tiered Storage (FTS) is implemented as a native data service of Enginuity 5876, and is provided to customers to support basic I/O to external capacity at no extra charge. Licensed features like FAST VP, SRDF, TimeFinder (etc.) will include external capacity as if it were internal Nearline drives – that is, the license charge will be for only 50% of the external capacity. But if you... Continue reading

Brian Gallagher, President of EMC’s Enterprise Storage Division, gave his keynote address today at EMC World 2012. (If you were unable to make it to Las Vegas, you can watch the video here.) In his keynote, Brian spoke about how enterprises of all sizes are increasingly seeking to leverage cloud technology to meet their constantly expanding IT demands. But, he noted, the cloud demands of enterprise computing aren’t adequately addressed by most of the current public cloud service providers. No, enterprise IT requires that their clouds to deliver the same continuous availability, predictable performance, assured data integrity, and security that they currently enjoy from their own internal data centers. And in fact, the lack of such “High QoS clouds” has slowed cloud adoption by enterprises globally. That’s all changing – transforming, if you will – thanks in no small part to EMC’s relentless focus on cloud computing. In his keynote, Brian talked about how customers are building out their next-generation data centers around hybrid clouds, and (more importantly) how the new products announcements made by ESD on Monday are laser-focused on delivering enterprise-class service levels to the hybrid cloud. From the incredible scalability of the new (Powerful. Trusted. Smart. and Efficient.) VMAX Family and radically improved simplicity and automation of VMAX administration, to the revolutionary high-availability active/active distributed data infrastructure uniquely delivered by VPLEX, to the glimpse into technologies that will help to dissolve distance to reduce the effect of latency on remote data centers, the biggest takeaway from Gallagher’s talk is that big enterprises no longer have any excuses. It is time to transform to the hybrid cloud. And we just might have a few things to help accelerate your transformation… vmax 40k builds big clouds The new VMAX Family, anchored by the VMAX 40K, is tailor-made for the hybrid cloud. The flagship 40K scales to more than 2X more capacity and up to 3X more performance than the nearest competitor. In fact, HALF a VMAX 40K (4 engines) is faster than the top-of-the-line Hitachi VSP or IBM DS8800. To compete with a full-blown VMAX 40K, competitors are going to have to quote multiple arrays, even though that will by definition increase the complexity (and reduce the flexibility) as compared to Family VMAX. I won’t bore you with an exhaustive list of the VMAX 40K features and such; you can get the details over the new VMAX Family pages... Continue reading

Just a quick post to update readers with some behind-the-scenes perspectives on today’s events here at EMC World 2012. The day here started with the release of 9 press releases covering the announcement of 42 new products. These were followed with a series of press briefings, lead off by Pat Gelsinger and followed by the division presidents each covering their announcements. Then there was the mad dash as more than 15,000 people proceeded to the main ballroom to hear Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger’s keynote presentations. While these were also simulcast and available for later viewing, I can assure you that nothing can hold a candle to actually being there– imagine a screen that is actually wider than an American football field, driven by ELEVEN widescreen projectors, providing a wrap-around view. Now, project onto this ultimate widescreen a star field from the perspective of a spaceship travelling through space and time (complete with a Store Trek theme), and you get perhaps a tiny fraction of the live experience. I was sitting in the back, and I watched people actually lean in their chairs as the starship banked into turns. Maximum wow factor, to be sure. The keynote presentations weren’t bad, either!!! For me, the rest of the day was filled with 1-1 briefings with analysts, customers and press…and there will be more tomorrow. I am purposefully NOT discussing the VMAX, VPLEX and RecoverPoint announcements just yet. Brian Gallagher will be covering these tomorrow in his SuperSession keynote. If you are here at EMC World, you won’t want to miss that, as Brian has really amped it up another notch this year with customer testimonials, videos and yet another episode of “Brian. Brian Gallagher.” Once his session is done, I’ll start rolling out some posts providing some of my perspectives of the launches. Until then…TTFN! Continue reading

Wow - EMC World 2012 is only a few days away! Are you ready? (I’m not.) The slogan for this year’s EMC World- Transform: IT+Business+Yourself could not be more accurate for what can be expected at the show. Just about everything at EMC World this year is about how Cloud and Big Data are driving revolutionary change in information technology, business and the people behind the scenes who drive value out of information assets. As you might imagine, things have been hectic around the Enterprise Storage Division (ESD) offices during the run-up to World. For the past 4 months our global team have been designing, scripting and rehearsing the more than 40-odd presentations and a dozen or so hands-on lab sessions that ESD engineering will be presenting at World. On top of all that, the cross-functional teams of development, manufacturing, training, services and go-to market have been working feverishly to put the finishing touches on the more than 14 new VMAX, VPLEX and RecoverPoint products plus literally hundreds of enhancements that are being announced and discussed at EMC World next week. The scope of these announcements is even larger than our “megalaunch” back at the beginning of 2011, and that was the largest announcement in EMC’s history. Among all the announcement are a few gems that are sure to cause some heartburn for the competition. But then, that’s always a fun part of such announcements! the main stage With all these new products coming to market at once, we have been busy collecting beta feedback from customer test partners around the, and in many cases we’ve been granted permission to use names and testimonials in support of the launches next week. We have created some very interesting and exciting content for the keynotes and super-sessions, including several custom videos. There is at least one video that I am sure will go viral after we see it during ESD President Brian Gallagher’s keynote (11:30-12:30pm PST) – it’s near the beginning of his session, so you don’t want to be late! Brian’s keynote – Accelerating Transformation to the Hybrid Cloud – will focus on the opportunity that Hybrid Cloud presents to businesses and the ways in which our products can help you get there. This year EMC will make all of the keynotes available to anyone, anywhere in the world via live simulcast. You can even ask questions during the simulcast and... Continue reading

Last week’s VSPEX announcement let the world know how serious EMC is about being a channel friendly partner. Compared to competitive announcements made by various companies last week, EMC demonstrated far more commitment to the channel community. In essence, the VSPEX announcement was about EMC’s partners, whereas the Netapp, IBM and HP announcements were about… well, Netapp, IBM and HP. Last week's announcements are being vigorously debated in the blogosphere, so for my part I'll try to explore some ground that may not be covered elsewhere. First, my observations on the VSPEX announcement and why EMC's event was different than what was announced by the other folks last week. EMC announced: Proven reference architectures built on a collective 9000+ staff years of experience and upon technology widely deployed throughout the world; Market expansion through enabling partners to capture more revenue at better margins, aided by EMC GTM incentives and programs; An actual VSPEX lab, leveraging EMC's $3 Billion in eLab investments and 100+ interoperability qualification engineers; The ability for partners to leverage EMC branding for the first time, enabling them to piggyback their own brand in the solutions they deliver to customers; And last (but not least),flexible customer procurement options thought EMC financing In all, far more comprehensive than simply another reference architecture. Now, what I'd really like to talk about was what was not discussed as much over the past week… vspex vs. vblock In my job as Chief Strategy Officer for EMC's Enterprise Storage Division, I interact daily with global corporations that are looking beyond incremental improvements and asking "what do I really want IT to look like, and how can I best support the business by getting things into production fast, operating efficiently and lowering costs?". At their core, all the announcements last week stressed flexibility as a way of communicating that customers can "have it their way", choosing the components that they want from the vendors that they want. Now, this has been a fact of life in the IT industry for the last 4 decades or so, but it is also a trend that is increasingly out of step with large complex systems in other industries. Imagine an airline insisting that Boeing or Airbus include a specific engine component from a different vendor and what the implications would be on cost, performance, safety and ongoing support from the supplier. Ditto for the car in your... Continue reading

Finally. Almost three years after Hitachi announced its High Availability Manager (HHAM), they have finally delivered introduced the long-promised nondisruptive migration service capability, heretofore to be referred to as The Bridge to Nowhere (BTN). I mean, seriously, who in their right mind would want to migrate from one to another Hitachi array… ;0) Read the press release (and HDS CTO Hu Yoshida's blog post), and you'll be inclined to believe that Hitachi's engineers have one-upped the industry with their latest "capability." But that would be incorrect, dear reader, for EMC's Federated Live Migration has been delivering zero-downtime migrations to VMAX arrays from prior-generation Symmetrix DMX arrays for over a year. In a race to remain relevant in the face of accelerating competition, Hitachi's engineers have seemingly abandoned the green eggs and ham clustered-array approach to tech refreshing its USP/VSP product line in favor of what is inarguably a direct copy of EMC's FLM. Well, actually, it's not an exact copy – there are several rather significant deficiencies in Hitachi's nondisruptive migration service (aka the Bridge To Nowhere) as compared EMC's Federated Live Migration. We'll explore these after the break. an imperfect impersonator Hitachi has a lot of engineers, but they seem to have lost their knack for copying other vendor's innovations of late. Dynamic Tiering is a poor excuse for automated tiering, especially owing to its bloated relocation size (42MB) and slow reaction time to workload changes. They were slow on the uptake for flash drives, and they STILL haven't figure out how to deliver active/active distributed access to LUNs over distance like VPLEX (which is what HHAM was supposed to deliver, if only within a single data center). So it's no surprise that behind all the marketing hyperbole, the Bridge To Nowhere is, well, both poorly made AND unfinished: The BTN spoofs both the target' (LUN) WWN and the port WWN; FLM only spoofs the target WWN. This is an important difference – Hitachi's approach exploits a security hole in the FC SAN standard, because spoofing the target port ID could be used to maliciously fool the target host into sending its data to an imposter. EMC chose to avoid this exploit. The BTN is sold as a SERVICE, which requires that you hire Hitachi Global Services to provide your migration. FLM is provided to every VMAX customer in the VMAX Migration Package, which itself has a list price... Continue reading

There has been lots of discussion since EMC's announcement of VFCache, much of it about the implications of said announcement on the storage industry. I've seen all sorts of assertions made by analysts, competitors, wanna bees and prognosticators from all backgrounds – some thoughtful, some diversionary and some that are just down right silly. There are those that say EMC's entry into the server-side Flash market validates the market for the early entrants. While that may be true in some regards, I will point out that when considered within the entire scope of the announcement, VFCache actually offers significant differentiation from would-be competitors. It is yet to be seen if or how the "established" players in server-side Flash market will respond to that differentiation. (More on this after the break). There were some who turned this argument around – because VFCache was implemented as a "cache", it couldn't compete with the "established" players in this space – this even though VFCache offers the traditional "Flash-as-DAS" for those that want it. So then they said VFCache was too small to be competitive, especially since some of the other players were talking about 10TB devices and such. I found all this humorous – not surprising, just funny. I always get a chuckle when the success of something revolutionary is measured using the yardstick of the "old" way. Like when EMC introduced the first Flash drives for an enterprise storage array back in January 2008. There were a lot of people (and even a certain competitor's CTO) who asserted Flash was too expensive to have any real utility, and that "nobody was asking for it." Today, barely 4 years later it is hard to find any commercial mid-range or enterprise arrays that don't offer SSDs in ne capacity or another (pun intended). Then there are those that assert this movement to server-side (Flash) storage represents a full circle return from the 20+ year external storage "diversion," portending the impending doom of the disk drive and/or the external storage array altogether. I assert that for either of these to be true requires an unforeseen discontinuity of pricing: solid state has to get a LOT cheaper than any reasonable projection, or hard disk drives have to get a LOT more expensive. Short of that, there remains a niche opportunity for flash-only solutions, but the sheer economics of $/GB will ensure that the vast majority of... Continue reading

Earlier this week, IDC published the results of its Storage User Demand Study, 2011 — Spring Edition: Unlocking the Minds of Storage Users. Among their findings this year was a notable use of outsourced storage, emerging demand for FCoE (but with limited commitment to the technology), and a predominant preference for midrange and modular storage. Surveyed users also forecasted that little would change in the way they utilize storage subsystems over the coming year. If true, I would think this bodes well for EMC, especially in light of the results of two key findings presented the SUDS, 2011 report. out in front of growing storage markets First, IDC is forecasting a significant capacity growth trend for high-end external storage for the coming years…increasing from just short of 30% annual capacity growth in 2011 to more than 40% growth in 2013. I believe this is a very realistic projection, especially given the strength of VMAX’s market share gains over the past 2+ years. Even as the mid-range is playing an ever-increasing role, the average capacity of Symmetrix arrays has also grown steadily over the past decade. Since VMAX is inarguably the most scalable enterprise array in the market (a point I recently underscored on this blog). The second finding in the SUDS report is perhaps even more provocative. With respondents distributed across USA, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Europe, EMC was selected as the platform of choice for 7 out of 8 applications. From SAP to Oracle applications to business analytics to VDI to Exchange & Sharepoint, users around the globe indicated an overwhelming preference for EMC storage for their applications. Again, given the strength of both EMC’s VNX and VMAX product lines, I’m not really surprised. What *IS* perhaps surprising is that both IBM and Hitachi are virtual no-shows in this survey. IBM appears twice and Hitachi only once among the top 3 selections across 8 applications. I tend to support IDC’s observation – customers are predominately electing to go with best-of-breed pure-play storage offerings. I almost daily have discussions with customers who are most interested in the highly differentiated capabilities and trusted track record of EMC’s information infrastructure products to compliment whatever happens to be the server du jour of their shop. Technorati Tags: IDC,SUDS,EMC,Enterprise Storage,Midrange Storage,Symmetrix,VMAX,CLARiiON,VNX Continue reading

Back in December 2010, EMC’s Enterprise Storage Division (ESD) released a major new software update for VMAX, embodied as Enginuity 5875. Among the more than 50 new features was the Data at Rest Encryption feature (which we internally abbreviate as “D@RE”). And then back in May, we updated D@RE with support for RSA’s external key manager as a complement to the embedded RSA key manager in the original release. Admittedly, Data at Rest Encryption is a feature that is offered by very few storage platforms – it is almost exclusively found only on enterprise-class arrays, in fact. And of all the implementations, Symmetrix VMAX’s D@RE implementation is highly differentiated – a breed apart from would-be competitors (as is FAST VP, VMAX’s automated storage tiering implementation, but that’s not today’s story). Separating VMAX D@RE from everyone else are features such as: Support for any and all drive types supported by VMAX. Where some other implementations are limited to offering encryption only on special drives with built-in encryption, VMAX D@RE encrypts all the data on all the Flash EFD drives, enterprise 10K and 15K HDDs, and 7200rpm “slow-spin” HDDs; A unique key for each and every drive in the system. With up to 2400 unique keys in a full-blown VMAX, the life of a crypto-criminal is much more difficult, especially as compared to competitive offerings that support a max of 31 keys for the entire array (the more data protected by a single key, the easier it is to find the key); Complete and transparent data at rest encryption for any and all hosts, applications and storage services, including Virtual Provisioning, FAST VP, SRDF, TimeFinder, VAAI, etc. Automated assignment of unique keys to every replacement drive and rekeying of data as the drives are rebuilt; Virtually undetectable performance overhead for either encryption or decryption (see chart at right); The ability to remove the keys from the array altogether when physically relocating the array as added protection against the accidental or malicious loss of the array (or drives) during the move. Deliver the array and the keys to the new locale separately, and restart the array without delay after the two are reunited. To my knowledge, no other enterprise storage array offers all of these native capabilities of VMAX D@RE. Arguable, I could stop there. But wait… It gets BETTER! fips 140-2 validation This past week EMC was notified by the USA’s National... Continue reading

Last June we shipped 8 VMAX systems to Detroit for the filming of the movie “The Double” which stars Richard Gere, Martin Sheen and a list of other top names. Like all of the product placements we do, we simply provide the producers with the systems and they choose how to use them. The trailer for The Double has been released and VMAX plays a very prominent role in several of the scenes, which bodes well for its role in the actual film which hits theatres on Sept. 23rd. Coming soon to a theatre near you: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/thedouble/ (Interesting coincidence of a post number, don’t you think?) technorati tags: EMC, Symmetrix, VMAX, The Double Continue reading

I guess I struck a nerve. Although Hu Yoshida chose to show the top 10 largest Hitachi arrays as evidence of the benefits of virtualized external storage, his rebuttal to my response post claims that Hitachi isn't in competition with EMC to see who can ship the largest box. Not surprising, I guess. Especially when the evidence reveals that there are no customers daring enough to push a Hitachi array beyond 1.4PB usable. You can't compete if you can't demonstrate that you can deliver what customers want. And that's exactly the point that Hu misses: It isn't about what EMC tries to sell. it is about what CUSTOMERS want to buy. It is the customer who decides how much data they want to put into their arrays, if/when/and how much they want to consolidate, what and when to migrate to a new platform. Oh sure, EMC analyzes customer requirements, provides recommendations, proposes configurations, and proffers references to help customers make an informed decision. But it is always the customer who determines which is the most appropriate (and cost-effective) solution for their needs. And the evidence clearly shows that Symmetrix customers are more confident that VMAX can support larger configurations than are USP/USP-V/VSP customers. Larger configurations help drive down costs through consolidation and efficiencies of scale. They also simplify operations and deployments. Symmetrix Federated Live Migration provides seamless tech refresh to effect consolidation of older arrays without any application downtime – and without the significant (and continuous) I/O latency overhead of an in-band virtualization approach such as Hitachi's. VMAX Virtual Provisioning has a more efficient granularity than the Hitachi equivalent, VMAX's integration with VMware is second to none, and VMAX FAST VP literally runs circles around HDT by reacting faster and moving less data to deliver highly-optimized performance for dynamic workloads. But the bottom line is this: customers vote with their wallets. Given that, VMAX must be doing something right: IDC StorageTracker data shows that VMAX's market share has grown significantly vs. USP-V/VSP and IBM DS8K since its introduction in April 2009. And before I'm accused of doling out the kool-aid yet again, I in fact do know many of the customers behind the top 10 VMAX arrays first hand – many are big names in their respective markets and geographies. And each made careful, educated and informed decisions when they opted for the proven, scalable capabilities of VMAX over the... Continue reading

Earlier this month, Hu Yoshida posted yet another missive in his never-ending series of hype about the virtues of array-based virtualization. In it, he cited records from Hitachi's tracking systems showing the top VSPs and USP-Vs ranked by total capacity. Oddly, the older USP-V racked up the largest capacity deployed on a Hitachi array, even though its maximum internal capacity is less than the newer VSP (a feat that Hu asserts is because the USP-V has been in the market longer (4 years vs. the VSP's 10 months). I had to laugh, especially given Hitachi's long-standing (and ridiculous) claims of supporting more than 240-something PB of external capacity. For the record, being launched in April 2009, VMAX has indeed been shipping longer than VSP, but not as long as the USP-V. VMAX also does not (at the time of this writing) support virtualization of external storage. With those caveats, herewith the top 10 VMAX arrays, sorted by usable internal capacity: That's right, folks. The smallest of the top-10 VMAX arrays is larger than all reported VSPs and all but 2 of the largest USP-Vs. Note also that several of these VMAX arrays are over-provisioned. Leveraging Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning, these arrays are exporting more capacity than they physically support contain. This affords customers improved capacity utilization, driving up efficiencies and driving down acquisition and operational expenses. In addition, most of these arrays are already positioned to leverage the benefits of Symmetrix FAST VP (if they aren't already – you can't tell from this report). I have to say, though, that I almost spewed coffee on my keyboard when I read Hu's claim that the largest USP-V was actually virtualizing TWENTY FOUR frames from different vendors. In an age when floor space, power, cooling, maintenance charges and operational complexity are seen as negatives to the bottom line, I'm actually quite surprised that there is even one USP-V customer operating in such an extremely inefficient manner. It is quite probable that this poor customer would realize significant savings were he/she to replace that multi-headed behemoth of intertwined FC switches and multi-vendor arrays with the elegant simplicity of a single VMAX. At the very least, he or she wouldn't be such a lonely pioneer of mega-capacity consolidation. technorati tags: VMAX,EMC,Symmetrix,Big Data,Hitachi,VSP,USP-V,capacity,virtualization,efficiency,utilization,virtual provisioning,FAST VP,Fully Automated Storage Tiering,Hitachi Math Continue reading

Since its introduction in April 2009, VMAX has appeared in numerous television shows, news digests, movies and even Mayor Bloomberg's recent press conference announcing Gotham City's new centralized data centers. It seems that producers, directors and video reporters are attracted to the signature bold and blue facade that EMC's industrial design engineers created for the world's most Powerful, most Trusted and Smartest storage array. You may have seen the following appearances (clockwise from top left): 24 (Fox) Nikita (CW Network) Covert Affairs (USA Network) Mayor Bloomberg's Press Conference on NYC's new City Agency data center 60 Minutes report on Speed Traders at NYSE But wait! There's more! vmax hits the big screen Most recently, VMAX is playing a supporting actor role in Transformers 3, now showing in theatres around the world. vmaxe hits the small screen Not to be outdone, the new VMAXe has already made its first cameo appearance, albeit on a slightly lower-budget stage than its bigger brother has been seen. Still, it is a powerful appearance, coupling both live customer feedback on how easy and efficient VMAXe is, plus a killer demonstration of the incredibly powerful VMware integration that is provided at no additional charge for VMAX and VMAXe customers alike. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome VMAXe to Chad's World! (click the image below to be taken to the Chad's World home page, then click the image there again to see the video). VMAXe appears at around the 6 minute mark, if you'd like to skip over the intro (no offense Chad, but many of my readers like to get right to the point). After viewing the video I think you'll agree that seeing these things in action live, in front of a real customer, is a lot better than some shill corporate blogger trying to convince you that their company has uniquely solved the problems of the modern storage admin. Or reading some official-looking report by some hired "independent" reviewer that makes outlandish claims about the "savings" advantage that a new, yet-to-be-shipped product has over VMAX (claims that were in fact made obsolete the moment we introduced VMAXe). The neat thing is this: everybody seems to enjoy putting the spotlight on VMAX (and now, VMAXe). That's OK with me! technorati tags: EMC,Symmetrix,VMAXe,24,Covert Affairs,Nikita,TF3,Transformers 3,Chad's World,Customer References Continue reading

Imagine: Start with the world's most Powerful, Trusted and Smart enterprise storage array, hardened by almost 23 years of protecting the world's most critical information assets. Scale down its Intel-based infrastructure and dial-back its innovative scale-out architecture to optimize for less-demanding enterprise environments. Remove the layers of complexity associated with supporting legacy hosts such as mainframes and iSeries to simplify configuration and operations. Eliminate physical drive and RAID configuration altogether and pre-configure the array at the factory for pool-based Virtual Provisioning to radically simplify resource allocation and management while maximizing utilization efficiency. Allow customers to add factory-configured Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) to further drive down the acquisition AND operational costs of both capacity AND performance. For local and remote data protection, include the world's most widely adopted heterogeneous Continuous Data Protection and Remote Replication capability, EMC RecoverPoint. Simplify the product installation to no more than a 4 hours to power-up, and 4 minutes to first I/O after the keys are handed over to the customer. Package that all in standard 19" racks configured to optimize floor tile utilization, requiring only single-phase power as evidence of reduced power requirements and deployment simplicity. Oh, and don't forget the trademark blue LED bar and one of those fancy little "e" thingies that the VNX guys introduced earlier this year. What do you get? emc Symmetrix VMAXe, that's what! Optimized for enterprises with requirements that fall somewhere between the robust capabilities of EMC's VNX (mid-tier) and the smaller end of VMAX (enterprise) platforms, VMAXe brings the proven reliability and scale of the Symmetrix massively parallel multi-controller architecture to an expanded range of customers, markets and geographies. All but gone is the complexity of yesteryear that competitors continually try to associate with today's Symmetrix. Factory pre-configured, rapid delivery and streamlined storage management. Pool-based Virtual Provisioning that simplifies storage allocation down to "how many gigabytes, to which host(s)?" – delivered in minutes and key clicks instead of hours with spreadsheets. Add in FAST VP, and answer one more question "with what performance policy," and the system does the rest – balancing capacity across 2- or 3-tiers based on the policy and the workloads dynamically changing working set. Need local or remote replication? Easy – add in RecoverPoint, natively integrated to simplify deployment, configuration and operations. And you can even use a VNX as the remote target for VMAXe – or vice versa! By eliminating... Continue reading

Hitachi Data System's CTO Hu Yoshida continues to try to defend the 42MB page size utilized by the Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT) on the VSP. Apparently his first attempts to put lipstick on the pig didn't go over so well, so now he has resorted to good-old competitive FUD as he tries to convince his readers that the smaller granularity employed by VMAX FAST VP (7.5MB) delivers poorer "cost performance" than HDT. Hu's basic premise is that the smaller the page size, the larger the amount of metadata that has to be maintained. He (incorrectly) asserts that VMAX FAST VP requires 54 times as much metadata than does VSP HDT. Further, he claims that managing and checking all that metadata requires 54 times more CPU cycles, reducing performance. He also makes a rather outlandish claim that the smaller page size requires 54 times more data movement. With all due respect to Hu, his claims are total hogwash! let's look at the facts Hu conveniently overlooks a several very relevant facts (and tries to misdirect away from them in his response to my comments): facts: FAST VP's metadata is (by design and intent) significantly smaller than the size of the data extent itself. Recognizing that relocating between tiers would always involve drives of different performance capabilities and cost, FAST VP was optimized to minimize wasted capacity on expensive Flash drives and to minimize the CPU overhead by moving the smallest amount of data possible. The CPU overhead of FAST VP's metadata is virtually insignificant, basically incremented a counter on any cache miss operation at the granularity of the FAST VP extent (7.5MB). When it decides to promote an extent, FAST VP only has to search for the busiest FAST VP extent and then copy only those 64KB tracks within the 7.5MB extent that are non-zero (tracks that have never been written by the host are never copied). While HDT has to search through a presumably smaller amount of metadata, it then has to copy a much larger 42MB of data to a different tier. A Copy operation takes CPU cycles too, plus there's the overhead of recalculating RAID protection if the source and destination don't use the same RAID geometry. The beauty of FUD when it is done well is that it is virtually indistinguishable from fact or truth (the two aren't the same) – especially if you WANT to believe... Continue reading