The rate of change in the IT industry today is unparalleled and it’s impacting organizations in every industry in a big way. Rapid technology advances like smart devices, social media, cloud-based services and others have ushered in new ways of doing business. I speak with many CIOs and CTOs in my role and they tell me their ability to react quickly and stay ahead of these changes is key to their business’ survival. They underscore that the architecture they choose for their data center platforms really matters, as agility must be present throughout their entire environment for them to be able to adapt to new IT trends.
EMC is helping our customers meet these challenges head-on by enhancing the VMAX3 enterprise data services platform to bring new levels of automation, performance and consolidation to the data center. Today, at EMC World, we’re announcing that FAST.X on VMAX3 enables customers to push the envelope farther (literally outside VMAX3) with an industry-first approach to storage tiering. Additionally, our new SRDF/Metro expands the capabilities of SRDF that customers have relied on for over 20 years by delivering active-active high availability for non-stop data access and resource utilization across your data centers.
VMAX3 – THE DATA SERVICES PLATFORM
Last year when we introduced VMAX3, we blazed a path in the market – introducing the industry’s first enterprise data service platform, radically changing what has been possible within the data center. VMAX3 isn’t just bigger, better and faster than our previous enterprise storage products, it is an innovative new architecture top to bottom, built to match the velocity of the industry. We designed the system to separate the software data services from the underlying hardware to allow us to deliver new software functionality much more quickly and in far simpler ways. What does that mean for our customers? It means we can rapidly evolve VMAX3 capabilities to match evolving needs – for the next decade.
Customers like Rackspace are leveraging VMAX3 to simplify their data centers while deploying more services. According to Chris Wetzel, Director of Product Management, “VMAX3 has allowed us to create a more robust offering to our customers. So instead of having to piece together different pieces of the infrastructure, we can standardize on VMAX solution.” You can hear more from Chris as he gets into more detail about how VMAX3 helps his business in this video:
ACCELERATING THE SPEED OF INNOVATION
Now, less than a year after VMAX3 first shipped, we’ve once again redefined what is possible to help modernize and automate data centers and converge business-critical systems into a single powerful, trusted and agile platform. FAST.X fully automates data movement to storage across the data center and to the public cloud. It extends trusted VMAX3 data services to those assets, allowing them to leverage our industry-leading RAS and software functionality as well as our radically simple, business-oriented service level objective (SLO) management.
VMAX3 tiering to EMC XtremIO with FAST.X combines XtremIO data efficiency (6:1 data compression with de-dupe) with VMAX data services offering the ultimate high performance/high availability platform for mixed workloads. VMAX3 tiering to public or private cloud with FAST.X and EMC CloudArray also allows customers to take advantage of the cloud’s greater scalability, lower costs and reduced maintenance.
With VMAX3, EMC is pioneering new storage-tiering strategies, taking services honed in the VMAX family and applying it to other storage platforms – and even the cloud. We hope that the flexibility, automation and control this offers, will empower organizations to make swift strides in their journey to transform their IT infrastructures in order to take advantage of new opportunities to redefine their business.
