Ask the Expert: Learn Your Guide to Survival in the Transforming World of IT from the EMC Experts

Good Morning!  Thank you for joining our Ask the Experts session.  Last week during EMC World our division announced several new products and features that will help you survive in this ever changing world of big data. Our Senior Vice President discusses those announcements in this video. We also have a full micro-site full of everything you need to know about what was announced.  You can find that by clicking here.

This space is for you to get technical and take a deep dive in to the new announcements with our experts.  They are standing by to take all your questions. Please ask away!

My name is Brian Henderson.  I run the VNX Product Marketing Team and I am active on twitter - @bhendu and I am on the Spiceworks community talking about VNX and VNXe products.  

At EMC World last week, a lot of people last week were introduced to the All Flash VNXe3200 and vVNX Community Edition.

Here's a couple posts on it

Chad's Virtual Geek Blog

Pulse Blog by Jeff Boudreau

Hope you enjoyed the posts - feel free to ask me anything!

My name is Andrew Lubeck. I'm a Consultant Corporate Systems Engineer for the EMSD division and have been with EMC for 16 years. In that time I have worked for Customer Service, Professional Services, and, for the past 10 years, Symmetrix Engineering. The products that I am currently supporting are FTS (VMAX), FAST.X and ProtectPoint. I also do a lot of work involving migration strategies and best practices.

My Name is Paul Martin,  I am a Principal Corporate Systems Engineer in the Core Technologies Division,Working out of the Cork office in Ireland. I've been with EMC over 10 years and have had various roles in that time all Symmetrix and VMAX focused. I tend to focus on local and remote replication and the management software for VMAX but am not limited to those topics.   

Like Andy I don't seem to have a bio above but I do have a twitter handle @rawstorage.  I'm happy to answer anything I can on here.  Welcome to the Ask the Experts Forum.

Welcome to the EMC Ask the Experts session covering exciting new Core Technology announcements from EMC World. The VMAX3 family continues to completely redefine Tier 1 storage. Customers can now leverage VMAX3 to further consolidate and simplify storage management while tightly integrating vital resources that live beyond VMAX3 arrays -- while increasing system availability. This latest VMAX3 announcement introduces these unique capabilities:

• FAST.X - external storage tiering to XtremIO, EMC CloudArray, and third party arrays
• SRDF/Metro - even higher availability and agile data mobility through Active-Active SRDF
• FAST Hinting - optimize mission-critical database performance via FAST Hinting

The EMC Press Release and Pulse blog covering VMAX3 announcements can be found at:

     EMC Increases VMAX3 Lead as Industry’s First Enterprise Data Service Platform

     EMC Pioneers Storage Tiering Strategies With FAST.X For VMAX3 - EMC PulseEMC Pulse

Thanks,

Frank Nicolo

VMAX3 Business Unit

Frank - During our #LoungeChats we had the question:  How does the new FAST.X for VMAX3 extend storage tiering to XtremIO or other arrays? Can you share the answer within our Ask the Experts discussion?

Sure. FAST.X with XtremIO and other storage devices extends service level management and zero data loss SRDF replication across the data center. FAST.X tiering to EMC XtremIO allows customers to benefit via in-line data reduction of XtremIO while leveraging VMAX3’s reliability and rich data services. FAST.X with EMC CloudArray allows tiering to object storage, your private clouds, or other familiar public clouds.

Hi guys thanks for doing this, they are always very useful. Couple of questions:

Adding VMAX data services to XtremIO and Cloud array is a huge win but how specifically will these platforms be consumed behind the VMAX3 - as a separate pool or within a pool with internal drives?

Do we know if there is any performance and storage efficiency impact to XtremIO with FAST.X?

How do we see FAST.X and cloud array will be used, the main concern being cloud array performance impact serving primary VMAX3 data that may be sitting in the cloud?

Will we support public and private clouds with Cloud array?

Do we have a list of  the 3rd party arrays that are planned to be supported?

I think thats enough for now:-) Thanks again guys.

vVNX was announced last week at EMC World?  Can you tell the discussion followers what vVNX is and the benefits?

Hi Mick, thanks for asking!

As to how the external storage will be consumed, the answer is a bit complex. For the near term XtremIO support (until September), the external capacity is in a dedicated pool. As of September, all supported storage except CloudArray can be placed in a shared pool (CloudArray is separate until March, 2016). VMAX data services are available on all external capacity. LUNs can be migrated between SRPs with a change to the SLO. When the external storage is in the same SRP, FAST can tier between that capacity and other (internal or external) storage.

There are some tests that were run by performance engineering on local flash and XtremIO behind FAST.X. For small block I/O with limited cache hits and lots of random reads, there will be a bit longer average response times (the FAST.X interface adds ~0.25ms to random reads). For workloads that are cache friendly, or that have large block writes, the caching in the VMAX can provide a large benefit so that the workload actually runs faster than on the native XtremIO storage.

The goal is to use XtremIO as an alternate flash tier, providing performance that is roughly equivalent to that of internal flash but at a lower price point based on data reduction.

For CloudArray, this is a dedicated SRP until March 2016. As a dedicated SRP, it is designed to hold only cold data. One we have full FAST integration for the CloudArray capacity, we expect that customers will want to restrict the use of that tier to very cold data (such as data that FAST can tell has not been accessed in 90 days). If the data on CloudArray becomes active, there will be noticeable performance issues.

CloudArray supports public and private cloud storage today.

We do not have the list of supported external storage systems available yet. There will be a lot more details on this as we get closer to the September GA. Until then, use the current FTS support matrix as a guide (things on that list are likely to be supported in the near term, and other arrays are likely to be further down the list).

Thanks for asking about vVNX or Virtual VNX. This was announced last year at EMC World where you may remember it referred to as Project Liberty. Well that "project" is now a reality in it's first implementation phase - vVNX Community Edition for evaluation and non-production use. vVNX is a free downloadable virtualized version of the VNXe unified (file and block) software stack that's built for VMware ESX. It includes a community-based support model for your software defined storage requirements that also provides you with a consistent VNX experience that you are used to. This Community Edition implementation is targeted for the development and test (non-production) of applications where you can quickly create multiple VNX instances without storage hardware and test data replication without multiple hardware platforms.

Here's a video to watch about vVNX

Download it now and try it for yourself!

Great, thanks Vince.

Our #LoungeChats had many people wondering... With the recent VMAX 3 introduction and the hype around the XtremIO all flash array, where does VNX fit in?

Hi Jamie,

The single word I'd use to describe the VNX compared with other members of the EMC portfolio is FLEXIBILITY. 

VNX provides you with the deployment flexibility to cover the widest range of mixed workloads while preparing for a service oriented approach towards IT.  from vVNX to a 1500 drive VNX 8000 system, we've got you covered.  It provides the best value per dollar compared to any array from EMC’s portfolio and is the preferred storage solution for many types of industry.

The three parts that make up flexibility include Unified Storage, Hybrid Flash, and Cloud Ready.

1. Unified Storage means it’s perfect for wide range of file and block use cases

• Configure as DAS, SAN or NAS
• Supports FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS
• We will look to add support for more data types as they become more established.

2. Hybrid Flash means it’s designed to automatic adapt to changing workloads -

• Supports tiered SSD/HDD to provide best $/workload solution
• Supports Flash as cache and supports Flash as a tier

3. Cloud Ready

• Built for private and hybrid cloud
• #1 in virtualization integration
• Deep hybrid cloud/ViPR integration

and it provides all of this Flexibility with No Compromise Economics.

As a customer I am seeing that VNX gets no love compared to other platforms in your portfolio. Look at support of layered applications like Snapview/MirrorView, you are stuck with limitations back from late 1990s. You still do not have support for 64bit file systems so you are limited to 16TB file system. Other mid-tier vendors are leaving you in the dust when it comes to services (dedupe, compression). So what's the plan ?