Dell EMC Introduces All-Flash VMAX 250F

Today Dell EMC announced that they were launching a few new products that were aimed at bringing enterprise-class all-flash storage to even more customers. These new products include the new Dell EMC VMAX 250F, to which the company claims the product will deliver an enterprise-class all-flash array with game-changing economics. Along with the VMAX 250F, Dell EMC is updating its HYPERMAX OS with inline compression and the company is introducing a new Dell EMC VPLEX for All-Flash.

Today Dell EMC announced that they were launching a few new products that were aimed at bringing enterprise-class all-flash storage to even more customers. These new products include the new Dell EMC VMAX 250F, to which the company claims the product will deliver an enterprise-class all-flash array with game-changing economics. Along with the VMAX 250F, Dell EMC is updating its HYPERMAX OS with inline compression and the company is introducing a new Dell EMC VPLEX for All-Flash.

(Dell) EMC has declared this the year of all-flash, launching its first all-flash VMAX earlier this year. Dell EMC is taking this same message and extending it beyond large enterprise companies. Smaller companies and companies with lower budgets also want to take advantage of VMAX’s all-flash enterprise performance and capabilities. The VMAX 250F is set to deliver the capabilities customers want while being easier on budgets.

Main features of the VMAX 250F include:

• Enterprise Class: The new VMAX 250F delivers all of the performance, availability, and data services that customers have come to expect from the VMAX family of storage arrays
• Powerful: Scaling up to 1PB of effective capacity and over 1 million IOPS with sub-millisecond response times; supports the industry’s latest 7.6TB and 15TB enterprise flash drives
• Scalable: Based on Dell EMC Vbrick architecture, each VMAX 250F V-Brick starts at 11TB and scales up to 1PB
• Compact: A fully configured VMAX 250F provides up to 64 host ports and is incredibly space efficient. Each fully loaded VMAX 250F V-Brick is just 10U and a fully loaded two-V-Brick system requires just 20U of space and fits in half of a standard rack
• Efficient: All VMAX data services such as inline compression, SRDF, D@RE, eNAS, e-management, NDM and more are available on the VMAX 250F
• XpectMore Program: With inclusion in the XpectMore program, VMAX 250F customers can enjoy lifetime protection and a three-year money-back guarantee

The entire line of VMAX products use the HYPERMAX OS. Dell EMC is releasing a new version of the OS along with the release of the new VMAX 250F. This release also coincides with the new release of OpenStack Cinder for VMAX. This further demonstrates Dell EMC’s commitment to the OpenStack storage community (so far the company has contributed over 80% more lines of code than its nearest competitor).

New HYPERMAX features include:

• Inline Compression: Operating at a granular level, customers will be able to target workloads that benefit the most from compression, including data that was written prior to new HYPERMAX updates. New inline compression and data reduction capabilities deliver reduced footprint and cost savings by reducing storage requirements by up to 4x compared to a configuration without data reduction.
• Non-Disruptive Migration: In just three simple steps, the new HYPERMAX can deliver greatly simplified non-disruptive data migration from previous generation VMAX arrays to VMAX3 and VMAX All Flash arrays. HYPERMAX also enables users to migrate live application data as well as revert to the source array, both in a non-disruptive fashion
• Virtual “Witness”: The latest release of HYPERMAX includes updates to SRDF/Metro, which reduces footprint and cost and eliminates the requirement for additional hardware by now offering a virtual “witness” to deliver an active/active data center.
• Third Site Support: SRDF/Metro updates in HYPERMAX will support asynchronous third-site support to provide disaster recovery over geo distances to a tertiary site

Dell EMC is also introducing a new VS6 platform of VPLEX (its continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility solution), as well as a VPLEX For All-Flash solution. The VPLEX VS6 doubles its performance, lowers its latency by two-thirds, and is able to scale much higher than previous generations. According to the company, VPLEX VS6 is optimized for flash with UNMAP support for thin provisioning, XCOPY support and Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) support across active-active datacenters. The all-flash version of VPLEX comes with a software license tied to a VPLEX engine without any limitations on the capacity or the number of Dell EMC flash arrays protected. Now customers can add VPLEX engines non-disruptively to support the performance requirements of multiple all-flash systems.

Dell EMC VMAX page

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