Originating Authors: David Vellante, David Floyer and Nick Allen
Summary
In 2007, several
Wikibon
members initiated “Tier 1 Avoidance” strategies and decided it was
sensible to move as much data off high end storage as possible to
reduce CAPEX
and limit
software license and maintenance fees. In 2009, CIO's must ask themselves three questions:
1.
Is this still the best approach or should we adjust the storage portfolio allocation in favor
of
Symmetrix
?
2.
Will the new Symmetrix bring strategic advantage to my organization?
3.
Should CIO’s invest in Symmetrix for the long term?
The answer to these questions depends on four factors, including: 1) Confidence that EMC will
deliver and continue to invest in the Symmetrix platform; 2) The cost premium of V-Max
relative to alternatives; 3) The importance of continuous availability, scale and automation to
your organization; and 4) The amount of process investment built up around Symmetrix.
Our initial view is where true 24X7 availability, faster time to deploy, automation and scale are
critical to the business; organizations should re-evaluate storage investment criteria across the
portfolio and assess the implications of this announcement. To the extent
EMC
delivers on its
vision, we believe the new V-Max can bring incremental strategic value to many customers and
will represent a longer term investment platform.
The Big Picture:
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The past decade has seen steady movement toward data center
consolidation
. This trend is
accelerating with higher speed networking, and new protocols such as 10Gb Ethernet and
Fibre
Channel over Ethernet
(FCOE) are enabling the interconnection of IT resources, including
compute, storage, clients, voice, and LAN.
This activity is underscored in the vision being put forth by
VMware's Paul Maritz
,
Cisco's John
Chambers
and EMC’s Joe Tucci where we are beginning to see a reintegration of data center
resources combined with linkages to “the cloud” -- including, most significantly, the Internet.
What this vision imagines is a world where customers are able to construct clouds of compute,
storage, and connectivity both internal to the enterprise and external to it (e.g., with business
partners). When managed together, these are called "private clouds" which are essentially giant
virtual computers.
The challenges of today’s array infrastructure are well-understood. Arrays are islands with
limited cross array management where moving data between arrays is cumbersome, leading to
historically over-provisioned and underutilized system. The bottom line is that storage
infrastructures must change to support this emerging elastic computing vision in three important
ways:
1.
Storage resources will be managed at more extensible physical distances.
2.
Storage resources must be available 24X7 forever.
3.
Storage must support automation of policies and
service level agreements
(SLA’s).
V-Max and How it Fits
To address these and other issues, EMC has announced a new Symmetrix called V-Max that puts
forth a radical new architecture based on a Virtual Matrix design. The V-Max leverages multi-
core Intel chips that provide more robust building blocks called V-Max Engines. The V-Max
initially supports twice the number of ports and twice the I/O performance of the DMX-4.
Symmetrix DMXs cannot be upgraded to the V-Max; however, existing procedures around
Symmetrix storage management and local and remote replication solutions such as TimeFinder
and SRDF are fully preserved.
The V-Max supports a Virtual Matrix Interface that connects V-Max engines and organizes a set
of resources, based on industry standard components (e.g. ports, memory, disk), which can be
managed as a single image. With V-Max, EMC is putting forth a vision to allow data to be
moved seamlessly across the storage infrastructure so that it can be optimally placed for
performance, availability and recoverability. Storage resources can be commissioned and
decommissioned dynamically and non-disruptively over increasing distances, enabling true 24 x
7 availability.
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Figure 1 ‐ EMC Virtual Matrix connecting multiple V‐Max Engines into a single logical storage resource
Why is this important?
Initially, V-Max will support up to eight engines in a single Symmetrix system. In the mid-term,
EMC will being shipping a scale out capability to enable the deployment of so-called federated
systems that can be distributed across the data center, enabled by the new architecture. There are
four main reasons why this matters:
1.
Today the
movement
in and out of array infrastructure is highly resource intensive and is
often disruptive. The virtual matrix approach will enable dynamic commissioning and
decommissioning of storage with true 24x7 availability.
2.
The new Symmetrix linear scale out architecture allows the easy integration of all storage
resources in a pool supporting a
virtualized infrastructure
.
3.
The architecture accommodates greater flexibility to create
tiers
which when automated
in the future will further drive down the cost of storage and lower energy consumption.
4.
V-Max sets up automation to meet service level agreements and enforce policies across
the virtualized infrastructure. The virtual matrix architecture can provide a set of
services
to applications, such as remote replication or copy services which can be invoked as
necessary.
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The business value of this vision is better asset utilization, investment protection for existing
Symmetrix processes,
near zero planned downtime
, automated SLA management at the
application level, and delivering the proper levels of performance to make application users more
productive.
Users need to understand that some of what EMC has announced such as federated systems and
the promise of full automation is future functionality that while extremely impressive, will not be
available immediately
.
The new V-Max systems that will ship in April 2009 include the
performance enhancements and the virtual matrix architecture. Some of the automation elements
will come later but will work on the V-Max engines that are initially shipped. DMX-4’s may fit
user requirements well and offer more attractive pricing, however they will not play in the future
federated vision.
Should CIO's adjust Symmetrix Investment Strategies?
We believe the following questions are relevant to Wikibon practitioners:
1.
Should organizations re-think
tiered storage
allocations?
2.
Will the new Symmetrix bring strategic advantage to my organization?
3.
Should CIO’s invest in Symmetrix for the long term?
The answer to these questions depends on four factors: 1) EMC's continued investment in the
Symmetrix platform; 2) The cost premium of V-Max relative to 'cheap and deep' midrange
storage; 3) The degree to which the Symmetrix platform can automate tiering and SLA
management; and 4) The amount of process investment built up around Symmetrix.
Investment Commitment
Wikibon believes CIO's can be confident that EMC is serious. In January of 2008,
EMC landed a
haymaker
by announcing the incorporation of
flash technology
into Symmetrix. Overnight, the
company recaptured the performance and innovation highground in this market space. The V-
Max announcement brings several substantial investments to the Symmetrix platform including a
completely new architecture that represents a significant commitment from EMC. The
architecture is unique in its total scale and there is nothing quite like it in the industry today,
particularly at the high end of data center storage systems.
The importance of these investments in our view cannot be overstated. EMC is sending a clear
message to its customers that it believes in the high end and is intent on protecting existing
customer investments in the platform.
V-Max Potential /Scale Cost Advantages
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The Symmetrix brand has always stood for great performance, the highest availability and rich
software functionality. Historically, the market was happy to pay up for these benefits however
recently other platforms have achieved “near enough” Tier 1 capabilities at lower price points. In
order to compete against the broader market which will deliver virtualized arrays, simplified
management and limited clustering, EMC must drive sufficient volumes to effectively amortize
its substantial development costs.
Can EMC increase shipment volumes? We believe yes and draw an analogy with IBM's
mainframe business. IBM effectively increased volumes by knocking out the competition with
low cost CMOS systems and Parallel Sysplex, which has strong similarities to the Virtual Matrix
Architecture. CMOS allowed mainframes to compete with lower cost Unix alternatives. EMC's
CMOS analog is flash and other semiconductor-based innovations that it must incorporate to
improve performance and remove spinning disks from the equation, driving tiered storage. On
balance, we think EMC's chances are good, albeit not a slam dunk.
Automated Tiering and SLA Management
The Holy Grail of functionality is automation and no platform has fully achieved this capability.
While the new V-Max appears to have great potential for automation, it remains an elusive gap
in storage products generally and specifically Symmetrix. To truly deliver on the Virtual Matrix
vision, EMC must provide the ability to fully exploit tiered storage granularity to optimize costs
and do so efficiently within the volume, as opposed to moving entire volumes which is too time
consuming.
We believe it is EMC’s intent to introduce fully automated storage tiering (FAST), a capability
that will automate the movement of data between high performance and high capacity drives
based on policies that address business requirements. Timing has not been specified but we
believe this capability will ship on V-Max in a 12-15 month timeframe. We expect this capability
to be initially managed dynamically based on activity and over time become more policy-based.
Process Inertia
Wikibon members cite a key reason for continued investment in Symmetrix is the processes and
procedures built up around the platform. We believe this announcement is cause for CIO's to re-
evaluate storage portfolio investment allocations and consider four alternatives as it pertains to
Symmetrix:
1.
Invest – particularly for areas of high availability, flexibility, automated tiering and
scaling. We believe approaches like the Virtual Matrix Architecture will alter the
economics of high end storage over the next five years. We also believe it is EMC’s
intent to extend the capabilities of Symmetrix to not only support megascale data centers
but to leverage scale and compete for enterprise segments currently served by midtier
storage.
2.
Migrate – in cases where Symmetrix attributes are not aligned with information asset
requirements and other platforms make more sense (e.g. NAS).
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3.
Sunset – portions of the portfolio where Symmetrix ROI is not demonstrable and/or
Symmetrix does not deliver strategic advantage to the organization in terms of
availability, flexibility and scale.
4.
Do Nothing – A strategy, just not a very good one.
Action Item
EMC’s V-Max and Virtual Matrix Architecture represent a new era in high end storage to
support data centers of the future. For environments where true 24X7 availability, faster
time to deploy, automation and scale are critical to the business, CIO’s should deploy this
new architecture when it becomes commercially available and monitor its business impact.
As delivered in April, we believe the V-Max architecture can bring incremental value to
customers seeking highest performance. Longer term, to the extent EMC delivers on its
vision, we believe that the V-Max will bring strategic advantage to many environments.
Related Research from The Wikibon Community
EMC’s Vision Thing
–Wikibon’s assessment of EMC’s vision of the data center of the future.
EMC Lands a Haymaker
– How EMC’s introduction of flash changed the nature of high end
storage, forever.
Enterprise Flash Drive Cost and Technology Projections
– When will flash drives overtake FC-
based spinning disk in enterprise storage?
Developing a Storage Services Architecture
– Former Wells Fargo Storage Architect John
Blackman provides a practitioner’s view of how to develop standardized storage services to
support applications.
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