One of the biggest is Federated Live Migration (FLM), a critical tool for moving data from one system to another. Obviously, EMC wants its customers to migrate from existing Symmetrix DMX platforms to the latest VMAX products, but performing complete technology refreshes can be time-consuming (taking months, in some cases), disruptive in the sense of application downtime during cutover and requires significant administrative resources. EMC claims that FLM-based migration can be accomplished with 75 percent less system downtime and eliminates application downtime. It almost goes without saying that this significantly reduces overall costs and administrative work.
Of course, this story is not complete without examining the third pillar of EMC's strategy, Virtual Storage. Here, VMAX capabilities have been expanded remarkably, allowing a system to manage up to 5,000,000 virtual machines on a scale-out cluster. That is truly enterprise-class. But that is just the start. A wide range of complementary enhancements have been made, such as the integration of VMware APIs with EMC's Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI), allowing it to work in conjunction with VMware Vcenter. That simplifies virtual server management while simultaneously maintaining architectural control of the storage infrastructure. EMC claims much faster creation and greater scaling of VMs with fewer data stores, and a 3X improvement in backups, testing, and migrations.
Large IT vendors that have a significant presence in storage, including EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Oracle and NetApp, have tended to support at least two product lines--enterprise-class (i.e., high end, where, while costs are important, capabilities are more so) and midrange (where, while functionality is important, cost receives greater attention). But any market segment can bifurcate. In the midrange, that bifurcation is between block-based storage area network (SAN) systems (in EMC's case, its Clariion arrays) and file-based network-attached storage (NAS) solutions (like EMC's Celerra).
Recently, the concept of what is called unified storage has seen a surge of acceptance in the marketplace. These systems combine SAN and NAS storage in the same box. To date, most vendors that offered unified storage would do so as only one of their choices. That is, customers could continue to order SAN- or NAS-based storage separately.
With the introduction of its new VNX family of unified storage, EMC is demolishing that scenario with a radical new approach. EMC VNX solutions support both block- and file-based storage, and will replace the company's long-established Clariion and Celerra product lines. For those who might have separation anxiety about losing a familiar brand, consider two things: One. a customer will still be able to buy current products for some time, and support for existing Clariion and Celerra products will be continued, and, two, the new VNX products have all the capabilities of both predecessor platforms.
