back to article The V-Max dust is settling

EMC raised a marketing whirlwind with its highly scalable Symmetrix V-Max last month, and much dust was raised as competitors and EMC made claims and counter-claims. What will EMC competitors actually do, though, as they assimilate the impact of V-Max? It's possible to discern likely steps forward in enterprise array design by …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    I feel like a hick.

    ok, I was unable to work out what the real meat of this atricle is about other than sombody has got a V-Max storage solution, which other people (who also do similar products) are concered about, and some ware along the line (around 2004 I think) these storage clusters had the controlers and storage separated, with the controlers being called nodes?

    However, I do not understand enough about enterprise level storgae to grasp the advantage of such an approch, nor do I understand why V-Max is so much better than the competition.

    This should not be construed as a suggestion that the artile is not good, it seems well written, I am just not familiar with the topic. A couple of paragraphs for us not in the know would be nice.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I just thought of motorbikes.

    Classic.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Err...

    Maybe I've missed the point, but aren't Symmetrix arrays already modular? You add director cards as you need them, drives as you need them and enclosures as you need them. I assume I've missed something here...

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Enterprise Storage Array

    Just having 1,000+ drives does not qualify an array to be an enterprise storage array. To qualify you need to to have the ability for a large amount of storage, large (100+) amount of servers connected with a large amount of concurrent IO.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    yamaha?

    When I saw V-Max in the headline, I thought you had an article on the Yamaha V-Max. That would be far more exciting.

    Mine's the set of leathers by the door...

  6. Nate Amsden

    fujitsu

    Fujitsu seems to be overlooked a lot, I was going over their site a few days ago and was quite surprised to see this monster array which at least on paper seems on par with many features that other high end vendors offer, and one or two unique ones.

    http://solutions.us.fujitsu.com/downloads/DS_Eternus8000.pdf

    Up to 8 controllers, and 2700 disks

    The Cyclic cache mirroring is pretty unique I think. I sent a note to my 3PAR SE who was pretty impressed as well though says they don't encounter Fujitsu much here in the US, must be more popular in Europe. With such an impressive system I'm surprised they don't push it more in the US.

    It doesn't appear that they do block based virtualization like 3PAR or Compellent. Also I don't see an indication of supporting hyper-dense drive enclosures. 3PAR's S/T class support 40 drives in 4U. Providing such density is fairly complicated as you need to have software that can automatically lay data out in a way to handle multiple drive failures(to replace a drive in a 3PAR S/T class you must remove 4 drives). Another big vendor that was pitching their stuff to me said they were going to go hyper-dense this year as well though I haven't seen it happen yet.

    Also I think the USP (non USP-V) is also a virtualizing storage controller. the USP-V is just the low end model of it.

    I think the V-MAX would of been more impressive had they scaled the architecture down to some extent so it's more affordable. Maybe they will do that in the future. I saw a price somewhere listing a V-MAX entry level system at $250,000 with no disks, the article didn't mention what it included exactly for that price. I suspect their interconnect is what drives a lot of the price of the controllers.

    When 3PAR announced their first array back in 2002 it was advertised as something similar - 8 controllers, 2560 drives, 192 fiber ports, 28 gigabytes/second interconnect on the 8-node box. Entry level pricing starting at $100k - http://www.3par.com/news_events/press_releases/20020610.html

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