New VMAXe Enhancements Deliver More Powerful, Trusted and Efficient Enterprise Storage for VMware Environments

HOPKINTON, Mass., Oct. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary:

• EMC® Symmetrix® VMAXe® delivers more powerful capabilities with increased scale—now supports over 1,000 drives—and availability of an all-Flash VMAXe configuration.
• EMC now provides more trusted enterprise storage with a new version of EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) disaster recovery software for VMAXe—SRDFe.
• Building upon EMC's industry-leading VMware integration, VMAXe now offers even more efficient enterprise storage with new integration with VMware vSphere® 5 cloud infrastructure platform, and new support for 100 GB Flash and 2.5" SAS disk drives.

Full Story:

HOPKINTON, MA—October 19, 2011—EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced several key enhancements to the VMAXe enterprise storage system—announced in July—delivering customers with limited storage expertise and IT resources even more powerful, trusted and efficient enterprise storage. The VMAXe is now more powerful with support for more-than 1,000 drives, and is available as an all-Flash VMAXe configuration; is more trusted with a new disaster recovery software option called SRDFe; and is even more efficient with new support for 100 GB Flash and 2.5" SAS disk drives. EMC also extended its industry-leading integration with VMware, offering new VMAXe integration with VMware vSphere 5 cloud infrastructure platform. 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 Highlights:

• More Powerful: The VMAXe delivers even more scale supporting more-than 1,000-drives in a fully-populated VMAXe array—operating with a choice of either 96 GB or 128 GB of cache. The VMAXe is also now available as an all-Flash configuration (also available with VMAX), which is ideal for customers requiring the lowest response time, highest I/Os per second, and most energy-efficient systems in their virtual data center.

• More Trusted: The new SRDFe for VMAXe is a version of EMC's SRDF that is sized specifically for VMAXe environments—supporting replication for up to 8,000 Symmetrix devices, which can include a mix of those in synchronous or asynchronous, and adaptive copy modes. In addition to the already available EMC RecoverPoint on VMAXe, customers now have more options in deploying either of these industry-leading disaster recovery solutions. With both SRDFe and RecoverPoint supported on VMAXe, customers now have multiple ways to integrate with VMware's vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.

• More Efficient: New VMAXe support for VMware vCenter™ Server plug-ins, enabling coordination between the VMware platform and either VMAXe or VMAX,® provides built-in storage insight in the VMware environment. This supports intelligent virtual machine storage provisioning, bolsters storage troubleshooting, and enables the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) solution related use cases for storage. This bi-directional "server-to-storage" and "storage-to-server" capability is unique to EMC. Additionally, customers now have the industry's most flexible configurations to leverage Flash technology—including new 100 GB drives, Fibre Channel, SATA, and new highly efficient 2.5" SAS drives in the same disk array enclosure. Support for these new drive technologies further exploit the cost and performance efficiencies available with EMC FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools).

About VMAXe

VMAXe extends the reach of the Symmetrix family to a new category of customers in the mid- to high-end enterprise, as well as emerging markets around the globe. Even more customers can now gain significant benefits within their data center with minimal risk using the proven and trusted Symmetrix platform technology.

The VMAXe uses the same industry leading Virtual Matrix Architecture™ and innovative software as larger VMAX systems used in the world's largest data centers.  Designed for organizations with limited storage expertise and IT resources, it features a new hardware design for a smaller footprint, and built-in software for fast installation, configuration and management.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing around the world is creating exponential data growth that many organizations are struggling to manage with limited staff, space and budgets.  The VMAXe addresses these challenges with the most sophisticated levels of storage automation, simplified management and provisioning, scalable performance, local and remote replication and the ability to simultaneously support thousands of virtual machines from VMware and others.

Customer Quote

Brian Carpenter, Director of Information Technology at Heritage Auctions

"Heritage Auctions is the largest collectibles auctioneer and third largest auction house in the world. The VMAXe is a killer product, which is why we chose it for our mission-critical SQL Server-based website, auction applications and to accelerate our move to a 98% virtualized infrastructure. With these new enhancements – 100 GB flash drives, 2.5" SAS, new VMware integration, and SRDFe – combined with EMC FAST VP and RecoverPoint software, the VMAXe delivers the power, availability, and efficiencies we need to respond to any request while also keeping our data highly available and secure. The VMAXe just keeps getting better."  

Analyst Quote

Mark Peters, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

"Mission critical virtualized server environments of all sizes require storage that provides high levels of performance, availability, data integrity, and security; however it's increasingly important - given the 'ultra' demands of today's new virtual data centers - to have storage that can also self-tune and optimize itself for virtual computing. VMAX and VMAXe both offer all the above attributes, together with tight support for the latest VMware capabilities; the package is now made more attractive with additional drive technology options and flexibility that extend customers' choices in terms of cost and performance."

EMC Executive Quote

Brian Gallagher, President, Enterprise Storage Division, EMC

"The Symmetrix VMAX family continues to be the #1 storage choice for virtual environments because of EMC's industry-leading VMware integration and unique FAST VP technology for cost and performance optimization. The VMAXe enables more IT organizations, both domestically and in rapidly expanding markets such as India, China, Eastern Europe and others, to accelerate their journey to cloud computing. Adoption rates of VMAXe have exceeded expectations—and EMC will continue to innovate to deliver scalable performance, automated tiering and other high-end capabilities—such as SRDFe, new drive support, VMware integration and new levels of scale—at the right level for this type of customer."

Additional Resources

• Read about Symmetrix VMAXe
• Read how Heritage Auctions relies on Symmetrix VMAXe

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.

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

EMC, Symmetrix, VMAX, VMAXe, and Virtual Matrix Architecture are trademarks or registered trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. VMware, d VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE EMC Corporation