EMC bares new storage products, innovations

SINGAPORE — Information infrastructure solutions provider EMC Corp. has unveiled 41 new storage products and technologies that are expected to expand the company’s leadership in the storage markets and usher in new innovations in the area of unified storage.

The next-generation storage family was unveiled in a three-continent series of press conferences and analyst, customer and partner events, coming at the heels of a greatly changed information and communications technology (ICT) landscape, including the intersection of cloud computing, enterprise data and big data applications.

“In reality what we want to achieve is eliminate storage management,” says Rich Napolitano, president of EMC Corp.’s Unified Storage Division. “What we are really doing is provisioning how people use storage, not how we build storage.”

This unified storage concept, explained Napolitano, is centered on simplification and ease of use for end-users and driving the cost down, while at the same time creating operational efficiencies.

The first of these innovations is the integration of two successful EMC mid-range storage products - the Clariion storage area network (SAN) and the Celerra network attached storage (NAS) systems - into a single, unified family of storage solutions called VNX, which promises to be three-times simpler, three-times more efficient and comes with triple performance value than current EMC mid-range systems.

The unified VNX family is based on Intel Xeon 5600 multi-core processor technology to maximize solution throughput and bandwidth and now the only storage solution offering both automated file and block sub-LUN tiering using FAST VP and powerful, extendable system cache with FAST Cache.

It also supports 6Gbps SAS, Nearline SAS and SSD drive types, and scales up to two petabytes (PB) per system (1000 drives).

“The systems dramatically simplify the deployment and management of virtualized applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, VMware View virtual desktops, and Oracle databases,” EMC explains.

Ronnie Latinazo, Philippine country manager of EMC Corp., welcomed the coming to market of the unified architecture, saying it is the most relevant announcement for the Philippine market as the new VNX family would have more to offer in the mid-market range, which accounts for the bulk of enterprise end-users in the Philippines.

“What we are really excited about is the VNXe (which is part of the newly launched VNX family) because the Philippines has a huge small and medium business (SMB) base and that is the market we could not serve in the past,” Latinazo explains.

The VNXe series is now the world’s simplest unified storage system designed for the IT manager who does not specialize in storage, with an entry price of under $10,000.

Latinazo is confident that VNXe could extend EMC’s reach in the local market, which currently stands at 40-48 percent across the mid- to high-end product range, one of the highest market penetration rates in the Asia-Pacific.

“What’s significant in the VNX line is unification of our platform because it delivers true operational efficiency for customers. Now, you do not have to manage multiple infrastructure. Now, you have a single platform from the lowest end to the highest end of the market,” he explains.

In the Philippine market, Latinazo says a lot of businesses are still using internal storage, which is the traditional way of doing things. The problem with internal storage, he says, is if you run out of capacity, you buy another server and that’s how companies end up having hundreds of servers with low utilization rate, which is not really cheap.

To move away from this traditional strategy and migrate to a unified storage or infrastructure concept is to realize that storage is a separate pillar in IT.

“The first strategy is to look at storage as infrastructure. It is not about capacity. The question is how do you manage the data, how do you protect it? That’s where the differentiation comes,” Latinazo says.

VNXe, according to EMC, can provision storage for hundreds of Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes, or a 1TB VMware data store, in less than two minutes. It also automatically double storage capacity utilization using advanced data reduction technologies and provide automated diagnosis, service, and technical support information in a single click.

Getting ready for the petabyte, exabyte clubs

EMC disclosed during the launch that EMC now has around 1,000 customers using more than 1 PB of storage. In the next decade, this petabyte club is expected to balloon to 100,000 customers. In 2012, it would welcome members of the exabyte club.

A petabyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to 1,000 terabytes, while exabyte is equal to one million terabytes.

In line with this, EMC also introduced new software capabilities for its high-end Symmetrix VMAX storage systems, which dramatically simplify the way petabytes of information can be managed, secured and exploited for business value.

Brian Gallagher, president of EMC Corp.’s Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Division, says that the new software capabilities now deliver cloud-scale capabilities for virtualized applications. A single VMax can support storage for up to up five million virtualized machines.

“What it means is the processing capabilities and the capabilities of our software to manage the information enable customers to virtualize more applications and by doing so they can save more money in their IT infrastructure,” he explains.

Symmetrix VMAX technology is designed for mission-critical virtual data centers and provided with new intelligence to automatically analyze and react to hundreds of thousands of concurrent transactions each second.

Gallagher says that in 2009, EMC announced a strategy for Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), which puts the right information at the right place at the right time.

“Over the past four years, we have worked with hundreds of customers, analyzed thousands of applications and over 54 billion transactions. What we have found out is that information is not created equal. We found out that around four percent of our customers’ information or data sets in tier one environments are hot or active and the other 96 percent are not. The activity also shifts over time as the value of information as it ages also decreases,” he shares.

FAST, he explains further, places active data on the most performing storage and takes the inactive data in the more cost, energy and efficient storage. As a result, end-users can effectively manage their information.

“Our new version is even much more capable and much more efficient,” Gallagher says. Typically, 140 TB of data need 1,128 disk drives. Now, that same 140 TB only occupies 152 disk drives. This also represents 90 percent savings in the number of physical disks in the data center. This 90 percent reduction results in less cost, less energy, less complexity in managing the infrastructure.”

VMAX Tiering, he adds, is also expected to avoid 27 million of KwH power consumption in 2011, enough to power 24,000 homes.

Onto a tapeless world

In the old world it’s the tape. In the new world, it’s the disk.

BJ Jenkins, of EMC Corp.’s Backup and Recovery Systems Division, says that if you ask people about backing up, retrieving data from a tape is painful and incredibly difficult to manage.

“Our answer is backing up to disk,” he says. “It is easy to manage and you can replicate all of your back up disk to another data center for deduplication,” he says.

The computing world is already getting off the tape. A study made by IDC shows that in 2005, tape automation factory revenue accounts for 12 percent of external storage factory revenue. However, in 2009, it was down to around only six percent.

“This six percent, however, represents over a billion dollars worth of tape every year. So we are a long way to go in our journey,” Jenkins says.

EMC, however, launched three new data domain products - EMC Data Domain 860, EMC Data Domain 890, and the EMC Data Domain global deduplication array (GDA) - poised to become the world’s fastest backup. 

“We are also announcing that the data domain platform will represent a new market for back-ups and the global deduplication array will support virtual tape library over private channel,” Jenkins says.

When EMC launched the first data domain product in 2004, the throughput shot up over 175 times. New Data Domain GDa is itself seven times faster than the nearest competitor.

Based on IDC’s analysis of enterprise customers, Jenkins says customers with deduplicated disks saved around $1 million, with a three-year return on investment (ROI) of 264 percent, and payback time is around six months. Recovery time is also down from 4.6 hours to 35 minutes.

The last bastion of tape, however, is in the area of archiving and EMC is also trying to make inroads in paving the way for its transformation with the EMC Data Domain Archiver, the industry’s first long-term data retention system for backup and archive.

According to EMC, the DD Archiver offers up to 768 TB of raw capacity that can be allocated between tiers to balance user requirements of performance and retention. It also incorporates capabilities such as logical partitioning of older data for fault isolation, an upgrade and migration architecture, a more granular disaster recovery configuration, and the familiar Data Domain Data Invulnerability Architecture - all of which are required elements in a system that is designed for the long-term retention of backup and archive data.

Overall, it has been a long journey for EMC since it introduced the EMC Symmetrix 4200 integrated cached disk array with a capacity of 24 gigabytes in 1990.

With sustained investment in innovation through R&D, reaching more than $17 billion over the past five years, it won’t be long before the company eclipses its own record of launching the biggest number of products in a single event.

“It is our core belief that in good times or bad, we need to over invest in R&D. And that is driving the innovation and the new products that you are going to see,” says Bill Teuber, EMC Corp. vice chairman.