EMC Introduces Next Generation VNX

New EMC Storage Arrays, Systems & Software-Defined Storage Speed IT Transformation

EMC executives, customers and partners kicked off an around-the-world, 24-hour live broadcast from Milan Italy, announcing new products that help give customers the speed they need to lead their IT Transformation. To view the broadcast visit http://www.emc.com/speed2lead.

• EMC announced the revolutionary new EMC ® VNX ® Series delivers unprecedented price/performance—one-third the price for the same performance of the previous generation.

• The world's fastest-growing reference architecture, EMC VSPEX ™ , now delivers 2X more virtual machines at the same price, and an even broader spectrum of choice for workloads that matter most—powered by the new EMC VNX Series.

• EMC announced the general availability of EMC ViPR ® Software-Defined Storage Platform, planned for later this month. It is scheduled to include both ViPR Controller and ViPR Object Data Services to store, access and manipulate objects.

• EMC today unveiled the “Project Nile” Elastic Cloud Storage platform that is focused on delivering Private Cloud control, security and flexibility with the scale, economics and ease-of-use generally associated with the public cloud..

• New EMC XtremSW Cache ™ 2.0 server-flash caching software provides new management capabilities and advanced support for VMware, AIX and Oracle RAC environments.

• EMC and Lotus F1 Team celebrated their technology partnership with the new EMC VNX5400 Lotus Team F1 Limited Edition arrays.

So how do you build midrange storage that can deliver up-to thousands of virtual machines per array, supporting mixed application workloads while keeping costs down? On the server side, Intel is driving performance with multi-core technology. Our challenge was to design a storage solution that exploits multi-core technology to unlock the full power of flash while leveraging the cost benefits of near-line disk drive capacities.

One approach has been to add flash drives to a traditional HDD based array. While this approach has delivered some benefits, the much more comprehensive and correct approach is a clean sheet design that’s optimized for flash and adds HDDs. This provides the best of all worlds – highest performance, lowest latency and lowest $/GB. Which is exactly what we did with the new VNX. We also developed MCx (dynamic multicore optimization) software that distributes all VNX data services across all cores—up to 32. This takes full advantage of the latest Intel multi-core technology.

NAS Performance
A new SPECsfs2008_nfs result was just published for a VNX8000 system resulting in 580,796 Ops/Sec (Overall Response Time = 0.78 msec). Compare this to the previous result of 497,623 Ops/Sec (Overall Response Time = 0.96 msec) using a VNX VG8 gateway with four arrays. What is significant is that the new VNX systems beat the old number with a single array – which is really what an end user would purchase…with a dramatic reduction in overall latency.

These file performance improvements are especially important for transactional NAS applications – VMware over NFS, Hyper-V over CIFS, Oracle over NFS – that require high-performance transactions at the lowest latency. The new VNX system has reduced NAS latency by up to 60%.

Virtualization Performance
Virtualization performance is also critical for midrange storage. The previous generation of VNX systems supported 1,100 VMs—the new VNX system supports 6,600 VMs—a 6X improvement. But performance is only part of the story. According to a recent Wikibon study on VMware storage integration, the VNX was named #1 in VMware integration in each of the three categories – general, block-only and file storage – for the 3rd year in a row.

Mixed Workload Performance
A recent Demartek study showed the new VNX running a virtualized mixed workload of SQL OLTP and Oracle OLTP with a total of over 735K IOs/sec. The VNX system also delivered over 300K SQL IOPs concurrently with over 10GB/s bandwidth for Oracle data warehousing. In addition the study shows how the addition of XtremSW Cache 2.0 improved performance with 31% more IOPS, and more importantly, 65% lower latency.

These powerful new arrays are available today, and are supported by EMC VSPEX (and the soon to be announced VCE vBlock systems).

http://www.econram.com/emc-vnx-series-hard-drives.html 

via: http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130904-01.htm

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Econram Systems is independent of, and is no way affiliated with those entities.

$1 Million Oracle SPARC Servers to Be Released

Oracle refreshed its Sun SPARC servers today for the first time in a couple years, with one analyst saying the new boxes are mostly for existing customers.

The SPARC servers are based on the new SPARC T5 and M5 processors, which Oracle unveiled earlier this year. The machines range from the single-socket SPARC T5-1B blade all the way to the SPARC M5-32, which as the name implies has 32 sockets.

Though the RISC- and Itanium-based server market is still a multibillion dollar industry, revenue has declined sharply.Numbers from Gartner at the end of last month indicated that RISC/Itanium revenue dropped almost 32% in the last quarter of 2012 compared to the same quarter in 2011. In addition, Oracle's server revenue market share went from 5.3% in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 4.1% in the fourth quarter of 2012, losing out to other big players such as IBM."Customers already on SPARC boxes will be looking forward to those systems," said Frank Scavo, a managing partner at Strativa and an industry analyst. "I think it's largely a play for Sun's install base."

Oracle hopes the SPARC refresh will help boost its numbers, and said as much in its recent earnings call, adding that they thought many SPARC customers were delaying their server upgrade until the new T5 and M5 servers were available, which is common.
Here are the specs on the servers:

• The T5-1B blade has one 16-core, 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 processor with up to 256 GB of RAM.
• The T5-2 is a 3U rack server with two T5 chips and up to 512 GB of RAM.
• The T5-4 is a 5U rack server with four T5 chips and up to 2 TB of RAM.
• The T5-8 is an 8U rack server with eight T5 chips and up to 4TB of RAM.
• The M5-32 is a full rack with 32 6-core, 3.6 GHz SPARC M5 processors with up to 32 TB of RAM. Oracle said this server will be focused for back-end database and big ERP systems.

Oracle did not provide list prices, but in its benchmark results it appears the T5-8 list price will be about $270,000 and the M5-32 list price will be about $1 million. The T5-8, according to the benchmark results documentation, will be available in September.

Marshall Choy, Oracle director of systems solutions and business planning, said the new SPARC servers will be "very singularly focused on IBM as the main competitor."

"The previously introduced T4-based systems are entry-level (to SPARC)," Choy said. "The T5 are positioned as midrange and M5 is at the high-end."

http://www.econram.com/oracle-sun-servers.html

All brand names and logos are registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Econram Systems is independent of, and is no way affiliated with those entities.

NetApp and Cisco Partnership : Expected 2013 Growth

www.Econram.com/NETAPP 

NetApp says it is looking to continue its growth in 2013 by leaning heavily on a partnership with Cisco to provide data storage and computer networking solutions for smaller-sized business customers. The company offered some insight into its plans as it announced its fiscal third-quarter earnings this week.

NetApp and Cisco are working together on what is being called the FlexPod system, which allows computer server, storage and networking services to be combined.

The hope, NetApp says, is to accelerate its revenue growth with additional technology infrastructure offerings.

The company says doing this will put it in a better position against competitors that offer a full lineup of computer hardware, software and services.

NetApp reported this week that it met its fiscal third-quarter projections for revenue growth at 4.1 percent and finished the quarter with $1.6 billion in sales. Net income was $158.1 million, or 43 cents per share, up from $119.6 million, or 32 cents, a year ago. 

The continued growth of the company also has fueled speculation that the company could be sold.  

There has been talk that Cisco may purchase NetApp. It has also been mentioned that NetApp may be a possible takeover target for IBM

All brand names and logos are registered trademarks of their respective owners.

EconRam Systems is independent of, and is no way affiliated with those entities.