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As EMC² counts down into the final hours before their live record breaking event, posts are showing up around three products: Data Domain Archiver, the Data Domain 890 and GDA, and the EMC² VNX and VNXe series. I looked around and found some info here and there on these new products.

Data Domain Archiver

The Data Domain archivere is (think the world’s first) disk based system especially designed for the long-term retention of data. This of course used to be the realm of tape. But as I discussed a lot lately, tape is on its way out and this product should be the enabler for finally doing so for real!

EMC² states that this storage solution will be just as economic as any tape solution. I see numbers that go right up to 28.5PB in a single two rack system. That amount of data would require nearly 18.000 LTO4 tapes at a compression rate of 2x, or almost 24.000 LTO tapes at a compression rate of x1.5! That is a huge amount of storage in a two rack setup. Combine this with a maximum write speed of 9.8TB/hr and you have a winner.


Data Domain 890 and GDA

Bigger is better. Faster is better. The Data Domain 890 and GDA which will be announced today are all about that. Both speed and storage capacity are at an amazingly steep slope in the Data Domain realm: The Data Domain 890 will perform at 14.7 TB/hr of incoming data, and up to 285 TB of capacity. The GDA system should perform at a whopping 26.3 TB/hr and up to 570 TB of capacity. Looking at average dedup effectiveness, that would mean you can feed it over 25TB of data per hour, and have a dedup store over 10PB in size!


EMC VNXe series

Now the thing that really captured my interest: EMC²‘s new VNXe series! This is a new family of storage. It is affordable unified storage, delivering both file- and blocklevel data (CIFS, NFS and iSCSI) to SMB customers. Optimized for VMware and Hyper-V, is should be fast, easy to use and intuitive.

The smallest one in the series is the EMC VNXE3100, which can have a maximum of 96 7k2 or 15k SAS drives and one or two storage processors. It larger brother, the EMC VNXE3300 can have up to 120 disks, two storage processors and 100GB SSD drives are also an option on this bigger model.

The base software of both models feature compression and file-level dedup (no block-level dedup as far as I can tell) in the box. Also, it supports (add on) snapshots and even application-consistent snapshotting for Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Oracle! Replication is not missingas well (add-on), as is security when it comes to guaranteeing data was not modified (for your basic archiving needs; an add-on as well).

Smart: These units no longer rely on battery backup, but they store their write cache data in flash when a power outage occurs. This is sounding more and more like an affordable solution that has it all!

Optional VMware facilities include:

• VNX plugins for VMware: Provisioning, management, cloning and file deduplication
• EMC Powerpath/VE Path management for iSCSI

I’m hoping that means support for vStorage APIs for Array integration (VAAI) right from the start for the VNXe’s. It is surely part of the VNEx’s bigger brothers, the VNX line.

All in all these storage arrays should simplyfy use and make storage more more transparent to the user. Goodbye tuning and tweaking to raid sets, hello flexibility and ease of use.

I want to upgrade my IX2-200 to one of these!!!


The EMC VNX series

These are the bigger brothers of the VNXe’s. Basically it appears to be a fusion between CLARiiON and Celerra lines to form a new, unified storage platform that should have best of both worlds and more.

I’m convinced the VNX series will deliver all virtualization automation like VAAI right from the start. As VAAI will grow in functionality, these units are the first ones to adapt to these new features I think. I am hoping for offloading the creation of linked clones etc.

These units are built around the recent Intel Xeon 5600 multi-core processors. With a new 6 Gbps SAS back-end and features like FAST/VE these babies should kick some, as I’m sure we’ll see during the upcoming launch.

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