EMC today launched the VMAX 450 and VMAX 850, two new all-flash configurations of the company’s flagship enterprise data storage arrays.
“2016 is the Year of All-Flash for primary storage and EMC is marking this milestone with the VMAX All Flash – a completely re-engineered platform that leverages extremely dense flash drives, paired with the power and simplicity of the VMAX data services platform,” said Guy Churchward, president of EMC Core Technologies, in a statement today. “VMAX All Flash is designed for the modern data center – delivering monster IOPS and consistent sub-millisecond latency while offering world-class six-nines availability.”
Promising snappy performance, the new hardware offers business applications up to 150 gigabytes per second of bandwidth, sub-500 microsecond latencies and input/output operations per second (IOPs) ratings in the “millions,” according to EMC’s estimates. Taking an appliance-based approach to packaging, the base VMAX All Flash F offering ships with thin provisioning, quality of service, embedded Unisphere storage management software, AppSync data protection and vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols) provisioning support.
The FX package adds Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) remote replication, data at rest encryption, ViPR Suite, CloudArray and eNAS file storage. VMAX All Flash FX arrays also include Unisphere 360 software, which provides data center operators with consolidated storage management for up to 200 VMAX arrays.
Similar to XtremIO’s X-Brick architecture – EMC snapped up XtremIO in 2012 — VMAX All Flash uses a building-block architecture called V-Brick.
“Each V-Brick contains one VMAX engine and starts with 53TB of usable capacity that can be scaled up to 500TB in 13TB increments. Multiple V-Bricks can be combined to scale out to a maximum of eight VMAX engines and 4PB,” explained EMC in a media advisory. “The VMAX All Flash 450 can be configured to include one to four V-Bricks and the VMAX All Flash 850 up to eight V-Bricks, allowing customers to scale-out performance and ports easily.”
Today, EMC also introduced its DSSD D5 “Rack-Scale Flash” appliance. The 5U hardware offers 100 TB of usable capacity (144 TB raw) across 36 flash modules, accessible by up to 48 direct-attached servers. According to EMC, the DSSD D5 can attain speeds of up to 10 million IOPS and provide data throughput at a rate of up to 100 gigabytes per second. Latency can dip as low as 100 microseconds, claims the data storage giant.
EU Approves Merger
Finally, EMC and Dell said they cleared a major hurdle in their blockbuster merger.
In October, privately-held Dell announced that it was acquiring EMC for an estimated $67 billion – the largest in tech history. Today, in a brief announcement, the companies announced that the European Commission has approved the deal unconditionally.
On Feb. 22, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) gave its go-ahead. “We are very pleased to receive FTC clearance as this takes us a step closer to realizing our vision of creating a global privately-controlled technology company. Together, our investments in R&D, focus on innovation and world-class sales and service will enable our customers to accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud and digital transformation,” said EMC’s CEO, Joe Tucci, in a statement at the time.
Dell and EMC are on-track to complete the deal this year, following an EMC shareholder vote in the spring.
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