EMC takes aim at the virtual data centre

EMC Corp. (Nasdaq: EMC) expanded its flagship Symmetrix enterprise storage array line by announcing the release of its Virtual Matrix Architecture and Symmetrix V-Max product, for use in virtual data centres.

The company’s Virtual Matrix Architecture and Symmetrix V-Max product are now available through all of EMC’s channels, with an entry level price point starting at $250,000 for V-Max, said Bob Wambach, senior director of storage product markets at EMC.

Wambach says the company’s target customers with these releases are primarily large enterprises. Businesses on the higher-end of the market will look towards these solutions based on their high availability and business continuity requirements and to help with workload consolidation.

EMC expects its new Virtual Matrix Architecture will have a huge impact on the high-end storage market because the architecture has the ability to support hundreds of thousands of virtual servers, tens of millions of input/output per second (IOPS) and hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage with just one storage infrastructure in a virtual data centre, Wambach adds. With the architecture in place, businesses can scale out resources on demand while at the same time also save on their overall energy costs.

Symmetrix V-Max is an enterprise storage system that helps businesses transition away from using legacy products, to solutions that are better optimized for Virtualization. V-Max is a high-end storage array that uses Intel multi-core processor technology to also help reduce a business’ overall power costs and to help improve the IOPS per dollar. Wambach says V-Max can hold up to two petabytes (PB) of storage in a single system and it also offers up to three times the performance, two times the connectivity and three times the capacity of EMC’s Symmetrix DMX-4 product.

Businesses can connect both virtual and physical servers to V-Max, which uses the V-Max Engine as the building block at the centre of its system, Wambach says. This allows for twice as many front-end and back-end connections when compared to EMC’s Symmetrix DMX-4 systems.

“Customers know their storage is growing incredibly fast,” Wambach said. “They want to be able to scale up in an unlimited fashion and be able to move their resources around to accommodate their needs (and) efficiency is always front of mind, especially in this down economy.”

A key benefit of this solution is there’s no limit as to how high the architecture can scale, Wambach said. If businesses do want to scale out further though, they just need to add more V-Max Engines, which interconnect and share resources within the virtual data centre.

Some of the key benefits of Symmetrix V-Max include automated storage provisioning, centralized management, reporting and control, fiber channel, gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI connectivity, with the ability to also support the latest generation of flash, fibre channel and SATA drives.

Wambach says EMC offers its partners a wealth of online support tools and resources such as white papers and a list of incentives for the channel right on its Web site. He also adds that the company is encouraging its channel to tell customers about the advantages of storage tiering because this, he says, is what helps lower costs, power consumption and also increases a data centre’s performance capabilities.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
Staff Writer, Computer Dealer News
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