EMC Symmetrix V-Max - It's About Time

This morning EMC announced its new Virtual Matrix Architecture as well as it new third generation Symmetrix V-Max based upon the Virtual Matrix Architecture. Since EMC has been hyping this announcement for at least a couple of weeks if not longer, I felt obligated to pop in and listen to the pre-recorded webcasts by EMC's CEO Joe Tucci and EMC's Storage Division President, David Donatelli, that highlighted the major aspects of this new release from EMC. And while it is impossible to summarize all of the features that a high end system like the Symmetrix V-Max will deliver, my initial thoughts were: "It's about time".

Donatelli made a series of points at the beginning of his portion of the key note presentation by stating that enterprise organizations now need storage systems that have the following characteristics:

• Can start small
• Can grow large
• Can scale linearly
• Were more dynamic and self-managing
• Were less complex
• Were more efficient

Not that I disagree with any of Donatelli's points - in fact, I couldn't agree more. But as I was listening to him lay out these points and describe the features of the new EMC Symmetrix V-Max, I wondered, "What took EMC so long?" Storage systems have been THE bottleneck in storage area networks ever since they were introduced into enterprise data centers in conjunction with distributed servers. In fact, you could not easily complete any of the tasks that Donatelli so eloquently pointed out above that enterprise shops have needed their storage systems to perform for some time. But now with EMC Symmetrix V-Max, I finally see a storage system that, on the surface, appears to match the needs of the distributed environments into which these storage systems are being deployed.

Here are some of the main new features that caught my eye just from the hour or so that I spent watching the various online presentations that EMC made available:

• Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST). Donatelli and the analysts and presenters after him repeatedly made the point that the Symmetrix V-Max would use industry-standard storage components. Using FAST, organizations can dynamically store and move data across different storage tiers as the V-Max offers support for solid state drives (SSD), FC drives and SATA drives, all of which are becoming a necessity in the data center of tomorrow. While Donatelli's presentation did not do a technical deep dive, it did on the surface sound akin to what Compellent has done for years and which I believe is very practical, "good enough" approach for many enterprise shops. Now as long as the licensing costs for FAST are not out of whack for the benefits that users can expect to experience, this should be a very popular feature that many users will take advantage of.
  
• A Single Namespace. This is the term Benjamin Woo, IDC's VP of Enterprise Storage Systems research, used to describe V-Max's ability to scale to hundreds of geographically disperse V-Max engines - up to 256 V-Max engines according to Donatelli. While it is not a single namespace in the same way that a namespace exists in Active Directory domains, it does communicate the idea that enterprise organizations can create a single logical instance using V-Max that manages all storage, user accounts and server connections through one logical interface. Also, while no one said this in any of the presentations that I watched, I would also assume this new configuration will make it possible to introduce new V-Max engines into the storage pool as well as decommission aging V-Max engines without requiring application disruptions or outages.
• The Perpetuation of its Engenuity Operating System. Opinions may differ on whether perpetuating the Enguity OS is a good or a bad thing but I tend to fall in the camp where I believe it is for the best. Yes, it probably carries forward some legacy code that is no longer needed or slows down processing in some circumstances but most enterprise shops prefer storage software that adds on new features and does not start from scratch. By carrying over EMC's legacy Engenuity code into the new V-Max, organizations can have greater confidence that there will be minimal interoperability issues between their existing operating systems and applications and the new Symmetrix V-Max. Further, advanced EMC shops can continue to leverage their existing scripts and calls into Engenuity to perform storage management and replication functions.

What I found most remarkable about this announcement from EMC was not the features that EMC wrapped into the Symmetrix V-Max. Anyone close to the storage industry knows that most if not all of these features can be found independently in other storage systems from competitors to EMC. So this makes it is obvious to me that EMC has been studying its competition for some time and is, in a sense, paying them a back handed compliment by incorporating many of the best features of their competitor's storage systems into the V-Max.

What does make the V-Max so remarkable is that EMC actually took the time to identify features users are clamoring for and then brought them to market in the form of V-Max. In so doing, EMC has gone from laggard to leader and widened its appeal to many organizations that may have wondered on what grounds they can justify bringing EMC into their environment. The new V-Max should accomplish just that.