EMC Raises Performance Bar for VNX Unified Storage in Mission Critical Microsoft and Oracle Environments

HOPKINTON, Mass., Oct. 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• EMC® VNX® unified storage delivers up to 14GB/s bandwidth in a high end configuration on the EMC VNX7500, ideal for Microsoft and Oracle data warehousing applications as well as high end video production, and seismic interpretation for oil and gas. The new high bandwidth option is also available on the EMC VNX5500—delivering up-to 6.5 GB/s performance—a 50% performance improvement.
• New Flash EMC VNX5500-F unified storage system delivers the highest level of performance and availability for demanding Oracle and Microsoft SQL OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads—achieving 10X the performance and 80% lower cost per TPM (transactions per minute) compared to an all-hard disk drive (HDD) based EMC VNX® system in mission critical OLTP environments. The new EMC VNX5500-F is designed for five-9's availability, a requirement for mission critical OLTP workloads.
• The VNX series now offers a new dense rack configuration and new 3 TB NL-SAS drives—shrinking 1.6 PBs of information per floor tile—offering flexibility for customers with floor space constraints or large amounts of less active data.

Full Story:

HOPKINTON, Mass—October 20, 2011—EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), today raised the performance bar for unified storage with new options that scale the EMC VNX to new levels of bandwidth, transactional performance, and capacity density—ideal for environments requiring the highest level of performance and availability for demanding, mission critical Oracle and Microsoft SQL data warehousing and OLTP (online transaction processing) workloads, as well as high end video production and seismic interpretation for oil and gas.

EMC today announced it has achieved 14GB/s high bandwidth with a dual VNX7500/single rack configuration, introduced a new high bandwidth option for the VNX5500, a new dense rack configuration with 3TB drives, and a new Flash VNX5500-F. These new options—designed to boost performance, efficiency and cost savings in mission critical environments—build upon the EMC VNX series, which is powered by the latest quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and use Flash drives as both a high performance storage tier and as a caching tier that is easily managed by the EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) Suite. It's these type of customer-driven innovations which led customers to recognize EMC as the #1 storage choice for Microsoft, Oracle and other mission critical environments in a recent survey by IDC (1).

Technology Details

• New High Bandwidth Option for VNX5500: EMC enhanced the VNX® Series with a new high bandwidth option available on the VNX5500—delivering 6.5 GB/s performance—a 50% performance improvement. The system is optimized for high bandwidth data warehousing applications from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, as well as high end video production and seismic interpretation for oil and gas. The option adds 4 ports of 6GB/s four lane SAS for disk connections.  The new option for the VNX5500 complements the full VNX portfolio, which at the high end with the VNX7500 currently offers up-to 14 GB/s bandwidth.
• New Dense Configuration: The VNX series now offers a new dense rack configuration and new 3 TB NL-SAS drives—shrinking 1.6 PBs of information per floor tile—offering flexibility for customers with floor space constraints or large amounts of less active data. The configuration utilizes a dense drive chassis (60 drives in 4U) and the option of Flash, SAS and near-line SAS drives.
• New Flash EMC VNX5500-F: The EMC VNX5500-F is designed for five-9's availability, a requirement for mission critical Microsoft and Oracle OLTP workloads. The new system delivers 10X the performance and 80% lower cost per TPM (transactions per minute) compared to an all-HDD EMC VNX® system in Oracle OLTP environments. As a member of the EMC VNX series, the VNX5500-F delivers data integrity, multiple RAID options, and proactive global sparing and diagnostics.  Advanced software suites also provide local and remote data protection, application protection, security and compliance.  

Customer Quotes:

Patrick Williams, Systems Specialist at NC State University

"As with any organization with a budget and limited space, we're always searching for data center solutions that are simple, powerful, efficient—and help manage our costs. The density—and ability to squeeze 1.6 PBs of data into just one floor tile in our data center is impressive. EMC now has the option to free up data center floor space—and reduce overall power consumption dramatically. It's impressive.

Dennis Robinson, Director, Technical Infrastructure GENEX

"Our business and success is measured by our ability to serve our customers—providing insurers, employers and third party administrators with managed care solutions and information management capabilities. We currently use the EMC VNX unified storage systems to scale our IT infrastructure and get the most out of our VMware and our Oracle environment. For environments where data availability and high performance are crucial, a Flash unified storage system like the VNX5500-F would be an ideal option."

Analyst Quote:

David Vellante, President & Co-founder at Wikibon.org

"Virtualizing mission critical Oracle and Microsoft SQL-based applications is a conversation of increasing importance amongst practitioners in the Wikibon community. A key consideration for these customers is predictable performance which is particularly difficult to achieve with virtualized systems. The data explosion is so enormous that it's becoming impossible to manually manage hot spots. As such, organizations are demanding efficient storage infrastructure that supports automated operations. With this announcement, EMC is stepping up to the challenge of evolving a proven and reliable VNX platform with innovations such as flash and automated tiering to support emerging client needs."  

EMC Quote:

Rich Napolitano, President, EMC Unified Storage Division

"As the storage market leader, EMC is now extending the simplicity, efficiency and performance of the VNX unified storage series to provide customers with mission critical Oracle and Microsoft environments with the high-performance and five-9's availability they require. Today we're building upon EMC's unique ability to help customers exploit the costs and performance efficiencies of Flash technology with the VNX5500-F.  Additionally, for bandwidth-intensive applications like Oracle or Microsoft data warehousing, we've improved both the throughput and storage density. Today's news is another calculated move by EMC to deliver customers the technologies they need to do more with less."

About EMC VNX Unified Storage

The highly scalable VNX series delivers 3-times simpler management, 3-times better efficiency, and 3-times more performance and than current EMC midrange storage systems. With EMC FAST VP and FAST Cache—both part of the EMC FAST Suite, the VNX series offers superior performance, capacity optimization, and comprehensive storage management functionality, while exploiting the benefits of Flash technology. The systems dramatically simplify the deployment and management of virtualized applications, including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Exchange Server, VMware View virtual desktops, and Oracle databases.

Additional Resources

• Read the VNX5500-F spec sheet
• Read about EMC unified storage
• Read the EMC High Bandwidth Overview for Microsoft
• Read the EMC High Bandwidth Overview for Oracle
• Read the VNX data warehouse whitepaper
• Watch the related EMC video on YouTube
• Connect with EMC via Twitter,  Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing.  Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

(1) IDC, Storage User Demand Study, 2011 — Spring Edition: Unlocking the Minds of Storage Users, Doc # 230148, Sep 2011

EMC and VNX are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation