Storage fan seeks 'mature' cash cow for 'something more'

It may come as a surprise to some people, especially reading this, but I quite like the Symmetrix (VMAX) as a platform. Sure, it's a bit long in the tooth - in marketing speak, "a mature platform". It's also a bit arcane at times - Symmetrix administrators sometimes speak a different language and use acronyms when a simple word …

[Michael Duke]

VNX has some life left but I can forsee a world with 3-4 levels of VMAX and Isilon Nodes and/or gateways on a common hardware platform using scale out rather than scale up.

[boz0]

While EMC may not have a really integrated solution for scale-out SAN, you can build a functional scale-out solution using VPLEX and a bunch of relatively inexpensive VNX.

[unredeemed]

You sure about that?

I'm VERY sure there are different sizes of VMAX like the 10k, 20k, etc. I think there is also a specific MSP version as well. The 10k and 20k can come close in price to the VNX 7500 depending on how the discounting is applied. VMAX they can go deeper on the cuts I believe.

Also EMC World will have something new for the VNX... At least that is what the sales reps are saying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You sure about that?

Still, even a VMAX 10k is probably in the range of $5,000 per TB after you include all of the licenses and services costs over a 3-4 year depreciation cycle. While that is competitive with DS8 and VSP, VMAX's traditional competitors, it is 2-3x the cost most people want to pay.

[Nate Amsden]

it would be interesting to see

Though perhaps the architecture of the VMAX -- especially the components chosen don't scale down well cost effectively. Hitachi in the same boat - hard to imagine them scaling their VSP down to the mid range(or lower), like HP/3PAR recently did with that platform (which competes directly against VMAX and VSP in many scenarios - certainly not all scenarios), and now has an entry level price point of around $20-30k (without any fancy discounting - just based on prices I found for the part numbers online and that includes 3 year 24x7 4 hour on site support includes thin provisioning and thin reclamation licenses). This price is not much higher than the "dumb" HP P2000 fibre channel platform. While still they have their high end P10800 looks to have an entry level price of about $140k (cdw.com), though that appears to not include any disks - so probably another $20-50k for an entry level disk config(and associated licensing). So realistically more like $200k for entry point on the high end(2-8 controllers 64GB data cache/each), of course depending on discounting.. One of the few good things about HP buying 3PAR is it's easier to get ballpark pricing without bugging the sales folks!

What's the entry level pricing of the VMAX ? $250k? $500k ? (assuming you were a new EMC customer and was not displacing existing storage with the purchase).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: it would be interesting to see

VMAXe starts at $200,000, list... which is, more or less, their mid range offering of Symm. I don't see EMC going any further down market with VMAX. They have a bunch of customers which would decide to buy that down market VMAX instead of their current more costly VMAXs which would not make it an attractive profit proposition for EMC..... I don't think EMC is too worried about it. People have been writing about their demise forever and, somewhat amazingly, they just keep growing.

[J.T]

HDS has a scaled down version of the VSP, the Unified Storage/VM. IT allows HDS to have the entire range of products.

Anyone saying the VMAX is an archaic platform is stuck in the DMX realm. And the Symmetrix folks using weird acronyms and weird terms are products of the 80s and 90s. The VMAX of today is fairly close to any other storage system in terms of how storage is presented, carved, etc... It's a very different animal and is only going to get more robust and interesting.

The VNX team is a fantastic group of engineers, who have benefited from being the second child at EMC. While the Symmetrix team have been aloof and "all mighty", the VNX team has been able to use all of the products, so you see better cloud integration, better recoverpoint integration, much better VMWare integration etc... EMC World is going to bring over a million IOP VNX and some other features. Neither product is going anywhere however, as long as the VMAX is the product of choice when you need a lot of back end throughput, which in the end, very few companies can match at the scale of VMAX.