EMC intros flash VNX, high bandwidth, density arrays

HOPKINTON, USA: EMC announced it has achieved 14GB/s high bandwidth with a dual VNX7500/single rack configuration, introduced a new high bandwidth option for the VNX5500, a new dense rack configuration with 3TB drives, and a new flash VNX5500-F.

Rich Napolitano, president, EMC Unified Storage Division, said: "As the storage market leader, EMC is now extending the simplicity, efficiency and performance of the VNX unified storage series to provide customers with mission critical Oracle and Microsoft environments with the high-performance and five-9's availability they require. Today we're building upon EMC's unique ability to help customers exploit the costs and performance efficiencies of flash technology with the VNX5500-F."

Also Read: EMC outlines flash technology plans

The new EMC VNX5500-F is designed for 'five-9's availability', meant for Microsoft and Oracle OLTP workloads. The new system delivers 10X the performance and 80 per cent lower cost per TPM (transactions per minute) compared to an all-HDD EMC VNX system in Oracle OLTP environments, claims the company in a release.

As a member of the EMC VNX series, the VNX5500-F delivers data integrity, multiple RAID options, and proactive global sparing and diagnostics. 

EMC also enhanced the VNX Series with a new bandwidth option available on the VNX5500, delivering 6.5 GB/s performance, a 50 per cent performance improvement.

The option adds 4 ports of 6GB/s four lane SAS for disk connections. The new option for the VNX5500 complements the full VNX portfolio, which at the high end with the VNX7500 currently offers up-to 14 GB/s bandwidth.

'Additionally, for bandwidth-intensive applications like Oracle or Microsoft data warehousing, we've improved both the throughput and storage density. Today's news is another calculated move by EMC to deliver customers the technologies they need to do more with," he added.

These new options is meant for mission critical environments, built upon VNX series, which is powered by the latest quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and use Flash drives as both a high performance storage tier and as a caching tier that is easily managed by the EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) Suite, adds the company in the release.

The VNX series now offers a new rack configuration and new 3 TB NL-SAS drives–shrinking 1.6 PBs of information per floor tile.

The configuration utilizes a dense drive chassis (60 drives in 4U) and the option of flash, SAS and near-line SAS drives.