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EMC upgrading all-flash VNX with bigger SSD and drive box

Products built for 'five-nines’ availability

Comment EMC's VNX-F range of all-flash VNX arrays will soon scale up to 172TB of usable capacity, with a less than $5/GB cost, using a new drive enclosure and higher-capacity drives.

A data sheet (pdf) on EMC's website talks about the new SSDs and drive enclosure.

These are block storage arrays, accessed by 1/10GbitE iSCSI, FCoE or 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel. There are two products in this range; the F5000 and F7000. Both are multi-core Xeon E5-2600 CPU-powered, dual-controller arrays with 6Gbit/s SAS links to the disk array enclosures. These systems are built using the latest VNX2 architecture and MCx multicore optimisation, introduced in September last year.

The F5000 has 2 x Xeon 4-core 1.8GHz processors. The F7000 uses 2.2GHz, 8-core CPUs.

Both products come with RAID 5 protection and are built for five 'nines' availability (99.999 per cent uptime) with, for example, mirrored write cache and proactive hot-sparing.

The Disk Processor enclosure is a 3U box with 25 x 2.5-inch drive slots. There us also a 2U, 25 x 2.5-inch drive array enclosure (DAE).

VNX-F with 120-slot DAE

VNX-F with 120-slot DAE.

We understand the VNX-F7000 will scale up to 172TB of capacity when 1.6TB SSDs are supported by EMC (which is soon), according to Stifel Nicolaus MD Aaron Rakers. He also claims EMC has a new 3U, 120-slot drive array enclosure (DAE) coming for the VNX-F7000 which will take usable capacity up to 172TB when used with 1.6TB drives.

Both arrays offer controller-based data-at-rest encryption. Customers can use a Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for VMware admins, an app-aware provisioning EMC Storage Integrator tool for Windows, Hyper-V, VMware and Xen Server. EMC Storage Analytics provides server-to-storage analytics and is powered by the vCenter Operations Manager analytics code.

Optional software includes a data protection suite, an application protection suite, the data-at-rest encryption, and the Unisphere Management Suite.

The less than $5/GB cost for some VNX-F configurations is higher than Pure's $3-$4/effective GB cost (after deduplication) but customers do inherit existing VNX data services and management facilities. For comparison Pure Storage's FA-450 scales to 70TB raw, and a claimed 250TB effective capacity after deduplication.

HP's StoreServ 7450 scales to 4670TB raw, and has a claimed $2/GB cost. Tegile's T3800 has a claimed 1.68PB effective capacity after deduplication and a $1/GB cost based on effective capacity. ®

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