EMC Technology Breakthrough Enables Virtual Storage Over Distance for Unprecedented Business Agility

JOHANNESBURG - May 11, 2010 -

Servaas Venter, acting Country Manager of EMC Southern Africa, says the new EMC
VPLEX technology is a radically new and better approach to data access and mobility, changing distance from a barrier that must be overcome to an asset that can be exploited.

“It will ultimately allow organisations to non-disruptively move thousands of virtual machines and petabytes of information over thousands of miles, schedule daily batch processes in locations with lower energy costs, easily shift IT operations out of the way of regional disasters, and dynamically balance workloads as the business day progresses around the globe,” he says.

EMC VPLEX, combined with other EMC Virtual Storage technologies like FAST (fully automated storage tiering) are transforming storage arrays in the same way server virtualization technology has transformed physical servers – from dedicated single-purpose machines to highly efficient, flexible, aggregated resources shared across multiple operating environments and geographies. The federation of compute and storage resources together allows entire data centres to be virtualised and managed as a single resource. This allows organizations to rethink their entire data centre strategies, their locations, the number of them and ultimately the role that each plays in the overall IT environment.

A key to Virtual Storage is the federation of distributed storage arrays, which is a breakthrough component of the new VPLEX technology. Federation transparently pools the resources of multiple storage systems locally and over distance and allows them to work together. Federated storage is not only more efficient than its physical predecessors; it also allows IT organizations to aggregate separate data centres and service providers into a large virtual data centre.

EMC VPLEX represents a major step in the journey to the private cloud and IT as a service. EMC VPLEX combines scale-out clustering and advanced data caching with unique distributed cache coherence intelligence to allow data to be accessed and shared across hosts and clusters within and across data centres. In addition, VPLEX is architected to be “array aware” to preserve investments in existing storage infrastructure and software functionality while adding new value through federation and the ability to pool resources over distance. EMC’s approach to distributed cache coherency is the unique technology that addresses the inherent challenges of latency, bandwidth and consistency that arise when regularly accessing and relocating large amounts of information over distances in real time.

EMC first introduced the performance benefits of integrated cache – pre-staging the most frequently accessed data into electronic memory for near instant response times – in its first Symmetrix storage system two decades ago and holds numerous patents in this area. This expertise, combined with acquired intellectual property, and a multi-year development effort, has resulted in a fundamental information storage breakthrough called AccessAnywhere that is first being delivered in a new product family and will eventually be integrated into other EMC storage solutions.

EMC VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro are the first two products to utilize this new technology. A solution that resides between the servers and heterogeneous storage arrays, each is comprised of high-availability VPLEX Engines that encompass two separate VPLEX Directors, each featuring high performance multi-core Intel Xeon processors, 32GB intelligent cache pools and 8 Gb/s (gigabit per second) Fibre Channel host and array connections. EMC has qualified the new VPLEX systems with major hosts, clusters, operating systems, virtualization platforms, storage area network (SAN) infrastructure, and EMC and non-EMC storage systems.

EMC VPLEX Local Features:

• Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility within, across and between EMC and non-EMC storage platforms within a single site/data centre.
• Simplifies recurring information movement and improves storage utilization.
• Features a single cluster with up to 4 VPLEX Engines (8 Directors) with support for up to 8,000 virtualised storage volumes.

EMC VPLEX Metro Features:

• Non-disruptive, transparent data mobility between EMC and non-EMC platforms.
• Ability to link two separate VPLEX clusters within a data centre or up to 100 km apart and to federate some or all of the storage volumes across both clusters, effectively presenting these “stretched” volumes at each site as if they were local, shared volumes.
• Able to synchronously relocate and synchronize data I/O, between two sites up to 100km apart (5ms round-trip response time maximum).
• Ability for any data volume to be configured for simultaneous access by applications in two locations, enabling relocation, sharing and balancing infrastructure resources.
• Validated EMC Proven reference architecture leveraging VMware Vmotion for long-distance live migrations to transparently move and relocate active virtual machines between VMware vSphere clusters over synchronous distance for Microsoft, SAP and Oracle applications.
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Live Migration to transparently move and relocate active Virtual Machines for more dynamic IT operations.
• Support for Oracle VM 2.2 with Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Linux and Windows guest hosts and EMC PowerPath with the ability to move workloads between servers locally with Live Migration and between locations using VPLEX Metro.
• Features two clusters with up to 4 VPLEX Engines each and support for up to 16,000 virtualised data volumes.

Future planned products include VPLEX Geo, which will enable asynchronous federation of VPLEX clusters to support requirements such as data centre migrations/consolidation and application relocation over cross-continental distances. Also planned for future delivery is VPLEX Global, which will enable distributed concurrent data access and workload relocations across multiple global locations over both synchronous and asynchronous distances. These products, which will be rolled out beginning in 2011, deliver completely new computing and data centre models that provide the foundation to fully enable the private cloud.

VPLEX is designed to be customer installable and EMC also offers a range of design, assessment and implementation services. In addition, EMC has strategic relationships with leading networking, virtualisation and application partners to deliver integrated EMC Proven solutions that support customers’ industry, business and technical requirements. All solutions are rigorously tested and documented with reference architectures and best practices designed to reduce total cost of ownership and ensure a predictable and reliable outcome.

EMC VPLEX

EMC VPLEX

Pat Gelsinger, President & COO of Information Infrastructure Products

Brian Gallagher, President, Symmetrix and Virtualization Product Group

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