Sign in / up

back to article EMC VMAX gets software brain transplant

EMC has given its high-end VMAX array a software upgrade that doubles performance, enabling five million virtual machines to be supported. It's claimed to support twice as many OLTP transactions and DSS (Decision Support System) queries as the previous version. The finding of such efficiencies in software alone is impressive …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. IO-IO
    WTF?

    Ooooh. NOT!

    EMC up to their usual marketing rubbish:

    It's FAST - because we say so.

    How about some public benchmarks or better yet letting people freely post theirs without being taken to court.

    VMAX is based on the same tired architecture, the only thing that has improved is the quality of EMC's powerpoint slides.

    Bin this relic and move onto something that doesn't trace it's origin back to the dawn of mainframe time.

    2 1
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      The whole point of VMAX is that it is a departure from the now defunct DMX architecture, which in turn replaced the original Symmetrix.

      Oh, and there is nothing wrong with something that can trace it's origin to the dawn of the mainframe, all computers, disks and tapes do that.

      I take your point about publishing benchmarks though.

      0 0
      1. IO-IO
        Reply Icon
        Headmaster

        vmax

        The largest change in VMAX was the move to industry standard controllers (which incidentally EMC used to say was a bad idea and gave the vendors that did it a tough time). This approach has been adopted by most of the legacy "big name" vendors now.

        Outside of that, the logical deisgn of vmax (how data is adressed and written) is pretty much similar to its predecessors. The core OS (along with the hypers and metas concept) is laregly unchanged. A lot has been bolted on top of this and wrapped in management tools to bring the whole lot together.

        This limits the effectiveness of any new capabilities.

        Modern day computing requirements are somewhat different to the mainframe era and as long as the fundametals of the vmax are based on what is now a fairly archaic approach to writing data it will never be able to compete with emerging mid-range technologies and new generation vendors and will become as niche as high-end UNIX systems and mainframes are increasingly becomming.

        1 0
This topic is closed for new posts.