Storage goes virtual

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2009

EMC, global provider of information infrastructure solutions, has released Symmetrix V-Max, an energy-efficient storage system using 20% less power per terabyte, according to John Jordaan, head of business development at EMC SA. Built for virtual data centres, the system uses EMC's new virtual matrix architecture.

Vodacom, Tiger Brands and Discovery Health are the first South African companies to participate in a pre-release test phase.

Joe Tucci, EMC chairman, president and CEO, says: “The shift from physical to virtual computing is being driven by efficiency gains too compelling to ignore. Virtualisation's ability to maximise resources and automate complex and repetitive manual tasks is overtaking the server world and is now happening in the storage world.”

EMC compares the increasing storage demands of today to changing the parts of a car while driving at 90 miles (145km) per hour.

Jordaan said during the product announcement at EMC's offices in Bryanston, that EMC has partnered with Cisco and VMware to drive the technology forward to the high-end enterprise level. He adds that EMC will be ready to work with Microsoft's Hypervisor technology, Oracle and SAP in the near future.

“In tough economic times, companies are pressurised to curtail their IT costs but they want more from their IT infrastructure. Servers, up until the arrival of virtual software, had lower utilisation, from between 15% and 20% capacity and were being used for primary applications.

“Virtualisation at the server level should be able to optimise that server to push its utilisation to at least 80%. That type of concept now exists on the storage side as well. With this new technology, we can enable clients to have the dynamics for virtual storage provisioning on a demand basis.”

Scaling up

The Symmetrix V-Max system integrates enterprise flash drives, fibre channel and capacity optimised Sata drives. It features multiple Intel Xeon quad-core processors with up to 128GB of memory and up to 16 host and 16 drive channel connections. According to EMC, it can scale up to 1 024GB of global memory, with twice as many front-end and back-end connections compared to EMC's Symmetrix DMX-4 systems.

According to Jordaan, Symmetrix V-Max provides more than three times the performance, and three times more usable capacity than its older DMX-4 systems and uses less power per terabyte and IOP. As part of EMC's Early Adopter Programme, Jordaan says more than 30 of the new systems have already been shipped worldwide. The entry list price for the Symmetrix V-Max is $250 000 (R2 267 550).

Storage support

At the heart of the V-Max system is EMC's virtual matrix architecture, which EMC claims breaks the physical boundaries of storage and is able to support hundreds of petabytes of capacity, thousands of virtual servers and tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second).

The technology is expected to support hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure.

According to global research firm, IDC, the information-centric society is growing and by 2012 there will be over 95 million virtual servers. Earlier this month, EMC revealed its intentions of aggressively growing its African operations, expecting South African business to grow between 20% and 25%, while its African business has a potential growth of 50%.