EMC Announces VMAX Family Re-architected for Enterprise Data Services and Hybrid Clouds

EMC today announced the VMAX³ family, which will shift VMAX towards what EMC describes as open enterprise data services. VMAX's enterprise data service model is an approach that can incorporate cloud access, data mobility, and data protection directly with local VMAX arrays. VMAX³ is built on the company’s new HYPERMAX OS and EMC’s Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture and will leverage integrated cloud technologies via TwinStrata, who EMC announced the acquisition of today.

EMC today announced the VMAX³ family, which will shift VMAX towards what EMC describes as open enterprise data services. VMAX's enterprise data service model is an approach that can incorporate cloud access, data mobility, and data protection directly with local VMAX arrays. VMAX³ is built on the company’s new HYPERMAX OS and EMC’s Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture and will leverage integrated cloud technologies via TwinStrata, who EMC announced the acquisition of today.

VMAX’s new HYPERMAX OS is an open converged storage hypervisor and operating system that offers realtime and nondisruptive data services. The Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture it will be paired with enables administrators to dynamically allocate processing power for performance and service level management. EMC believes that this approach can balance the control and trust management offered by traditional data center storage models alongside the flexibility and scaling functionality of cloud platforms. In other words, VMAX³ will allow administrators to designate whether specific workloads should be run from within the data center or in a public cloud service according to security, performance, and other criteria.

EMC also announced its acquisition of TwinStrata today, allowing VMAX to leverage TwinStrata’s support for many public cloud providers. TwinStrata’s cloud services will eventually become available as a public cloud counterpart for local VMAX arrays and will incorporate the TwinStrata cloud tiering technology which can automatically move infrequently accessed data to the public cloud to reduce local storage costs.

New VMAX³ hybrid arrays will support hybrid cloud deployments by dynamically allocating up to 384 processing cores to these mixed workloads. Hybrid VMAX³ solutions can be sized for hundreds of virtual machines with scalability up to tens of thousands of VMs. According to EMC, VMAX³ is tuned for applications such as Oracle, SQL, SAP transactional processing, high bandwidth data analytics, and file workloads and will offer up to three times faster performance and 50% lower total cost of ownership compared to current VMAX deployments for these applications.

The new VMAX Advanced FAST Suite will offer single-click provisioning and will allow customers define service level objectives across consolidated mixed workloads. Integration with EMC’s ViPR can extend these provisioning and service level capabilities to users via a self-service model. A new EMC ProtectPoint data protection solution also provides direct backup to EMC Data Domain in order to streamline VMAX backup infrastructure.

Availability

VMAX³ systems are expected in the third quarter of 2014.  Embedded file and ProtectPoint functionality will be available in the fourth quarter of 2014 and will be licensed separately. Details about the availability of the new TwinStrata integrations have yet to be announced.

EMC VMAX Product Page

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