As we transition to a new year many people will make a resolution to do things better in life; to transform the way they live and interact in the world. Some get a new job to increase life satisfaction, to make more money or quite simply live a healthier lifestyle. As a legacy EMC employee, we, as a company are transitioning to Dell EMC for the better. And to do that, we must continue to operate flawlessly into 2017 and beyond for our customers. We here at Dell EMC also want to see. our customers flawlessly transform their data center for the better.
For our customers running VMAX 1 and VMAX 2 (10/20/40K) platforms, refreshing to a new VMAX All Flash delivers incredible operational and TCO benefits. We created VMAX All Flash to allow you run your business more effectively. Not only is it easy to purchase, migrate to and grow, but it’s so much simpler to manage. Add to that the cost savings in footprint and consolidation and a storage managers life couldn’t get much better.
Here’s a quick example of a customer that did a VMAX 20K refresh to a new VMAX 450F. This customer had a 9-Bay VMAX 20K with 800TB of usable capacity. We transformed them from a 9 rack VMAX 20K to a single bay/single floor tile VMAX 450F. This new model delivered 6x more performance, 87% less energy, 92% less footprint with a whopping 40% lower TCO.
The new VMAX All Flash models are engineered for blazing performance delivering over 4M IOPS and less than 500μ response times for workloads on a single all-flash tier. Our newest family member, the VMAX 250F along with the VMAX 450F and VMAX 850F use only the latest SSD flash and provide significant performance, scale and density improvements over VMAX 1 and 2. VMAX All Flash features a newly designed packaging scheme called a V-Brick. A V-Brick combines a VMAX engine and dedicated storage capacity. To scale up performance simply add another V-Brick. To scale out storage, simply add a Flash Capacity pack. Super simple.
VMAX All Flash doesn’t come up short in software. Our Software is no longer array/capacity based; instead there are two simple options – a “basic” F Package and “luxury” FX Package. Depending on the package you select, you continue to get the wealth of VMAX advanced data services such as SRDF, now with Active/Active replication capabilities, embedded NAS, and new TimeFinder SNAP VX snapshots. Our new snapshots, are super-efficient scaling up to 16 million per system. And then you have ProtectPoint which delivers the performance of snapshots with the functionality of backups to Data Domain while CloudArray makes tiering to public/private cloud easy and secure. All new capabilities available in our transformational next generation VMAX platform.
Finally, let’s talk about new VMAX compression. Customer adoption for all-new VMAX compression has been incredibly fast and feedback has been extremely positive. One customer indicated they’d been running compression for two weeks and hadn’t seen any noticeable performance impact even when looking for one to occur. Another customer bragged to their sales person how smooth, fast and efficient compression was compared to other vendors. The best part, VMAX All Flash comes ready for inline compression with the software and hardware compression modules included on every array.
We’re already seeing VMAX All Flash compression up to 12:1 on select workloads, with most customers averaging around 2:1. Don’t worry; you don’t have to turn off any data services while compression is on, our “no-compromise” compression works with all VMAX data services. When you combine inline compression with other space saving technologies in VMAX All Flash, most customers achieve an overall 4:1 storage efficiency benefit.
Worried about SSD endurance? VMAX All Flash arrays are part of Dell EMC’s popular Xpect More Program. Allowing you to lock into lifetime maintenance pricing protection, lifetime flash endurance protection, and 3-year money back warranty with the Xpect More Program if the product does not operation as expected.
After reading all this, I know what you’re thinking, “I need to upgrade my current VMAX to a VMAX All Flash”. We’ve made upgrading to VMAX All Flash so easy! Our sales and partner teams will evaluate your workload requirements ensuring the array arrives onsite ready to perform. No more BIN files to futz with or fine-tune. With only a single-storage tier, provisioning with Unisphere takes 4 steps and less than 30 seconds. Gone are the days of storage tier provisioning and moving of workloads which aren’t performing. As I said, VMAX All Flash has only a single tier of all flash storage which delivers .5ms or response time for ALL Workloads. New Non-disruptive migrations enable existing VMAX customers to migrate live applications to a new VMAX All flash without ever having to take applications offline.
So it’s now 2017 and a new and exciting time for us at the new Dell EMC. Our resolution is to help as many customers as we can on their transformational journey in their data center. We know that VMAX All Flash is just what they need to take the first step.