EMC re-engineers its VNX flashy boxen, puts Unity on the label

EMC's mid-range VNX/VNXe arrays have been re-engineered to make better use of flash, producing the Unity array with a starting price of less than $10,000. It is firmly in the active:active, dual-controller mode and comes in all-flash, hybrid flash/disk, and software-only (VSA) configurations. The array is positioned as an SME …

[Nate Amsden]

30k iops

is that for the low end model or for the high end model?

Just looking at what HP claims for the 8200:

"The HP 3PAR StoreServ 8200 All-Flash Starter Kit features the same flash-optimized architecture as the entire family of HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage arrays—including cache handling enhancements and system-wide striping to deliver over 75,000 IOPS and sub-millisecond response times. Performance is also scalable to 320,000 IOPS." (I have no doubt the numbers here are quoted at 100% read)

So this 30k number is about 1/10th what the low end 3PAR 8200 can do? (unlike the 8400 the 8200 does not go beyond 2 controllers).

On that same note, assuming the article is accurate I had no idea the existing VNX arrays were *that* slow(apparently not much more than 10k IOPS).

[M. B.]

Re: 30k iops

That is weird.

Last year EMC had a low-cost all-flash VNXe bundle available through channel partners capable of 75,000 IOPS. I sold a few of them, one to a school who was blown away by how fast their VDI sessions would recompose - it was really impressive. I mean Unisphere is.. Unisphere, but the product as bundled was really good overall. Pretty sure the 75k was 100% read but I've seen it do 40k on an actual workload.

The VNX8000 has a published SPC-1 benchmark at 435,000 IOPS. Their current claims make no sense.

I have one customer in particular who cares about IOPS and latency beyond the "it's working, so it must be fine" metric with a VNX5400, they've benchmarked over 25k IOPS with no more than a few SSDs and the rest all spinning disk still under 40 spindles in total.

I sense marketing fail somewhere along the line. The VNX is a lot faster than this article leads on.

Note: I work for Dell now so I'm sure there's something I need to be up front about or something. Somewhere. At some point. Whatever.

[RollTide14]

Re: 30k iops

I'm hoping they missed a 0 in there....300,000 sounds more realistic than 30,000 no?

[Fortycoats]

No more Java

About time: the new GUI is HTML5, not Java-based any more. And it looks like you can do most file-operations in the GUI, instead of being forced to use SSH to a control station to do certain things. It looks like it really is a unified array, instead of Celerra-bolted-to-a-Clariion (a.k.a. VNX Unified).

But there's no in-line dedup (compression is coming soon). Expect to hear plenty about that from Pure.

[Archaon]

Normal EMC pricing?

Admittedly everyone else is just as guilty of the "Starts at £X" marketing but starts at $18k, add a set of 10 small SSDs $68k. Add the usual other bits and bobs and software licenses $88k. Tack on semi-mandatory support for another $30k to bring you up to $118k.

$118k sounds much more realistic than $18k to me.

Also 30,000 IOPS really is not impressive in this space. As it's a re-engineered VNX I can't say I'm surprised by it capping out around that point, but that decision to cut costs be fettling an existing box will show in the long term.

[vdthemyk]

Re: Normal EMC pricing?

They are using 3D nand for the flash. So the cost is going to be much less than the flash on the vnx2 which used SLC and eMLC for specific use cases.

Also, I am at EMC world, and that price point has a caveat of *estimated street price* Meaning, they are likely using the absolute lowest price configuration, tacked onto a bigger deal.

All in all, I think it will function well for a small to midsize use case. And it will compete with the low end market well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Normal EMC pricing?

Unity can perform up to three times faster than present VNX/VNxe arrays, delivering up to 300,000 IOPS.

On bits and bobs Unity pricing is inclusive of software and support

Unity All Flash Base Software Package:

All inclusive for the simple, intuitive management, monitoring and troubleshooting for Unity All Flash systems

UNITY 300F, UNITY 400F, UNITY 500F, AND UNITY 600F

Management Software:

• Unisphere: Element Manager

• Unisphere Central: Consolidated dashboard and alerting

• Thin Provisioning

• Proactive Assist: Configure remote support, online chat, open a service

request, etc.)

• Quality of Service (for Block)

• EMC Storage Analytics Adapter for VMware® vRealizeTM

Unified Protocols:

• File

• Block

• VVols Local Protection:

• Controller Based Encryption (optional)

• Local Point-In-Time Copies

• Anti-virus

Remote Protection:

• Native Asynchronous Block & File Replication

• Native Synchronous Block Replication

• RecoverPoint Basic

• RecoverPoint for VMs

[cBells]

30K iops is marketed only for the $18K all flash "starter" configuration, which only offers a handful of usable TBs. I wouldn't rely on this marketing jibber jabber until we see more solid, customer based metrics released from EMC and its partners in the coming weeks.