Rich Napolitano, President Unified Storage Division got up and showed some technology demonstrations of what they had working in their labs. Rich had some of his long time engineers up on the stage to show what was running in their labs.
- First up was a dual controller, dual processors per controller 8 core processing chips (32cores in all) running against an all SSD backend. The configuration was up for a short time but it seemed like 96 SSDs, so an all-flash VNX array. They used Iometer, random-8KB IO to drive almost 975K IOPS at sub-msec. response time. They hit 1M IOPS with just slightly above 1 msec. response time. You could see the processor utilization of the 32 cores going up as the workload reached higher levels. Couldn’t see precisely but all the cores were running at ~70-80% busy at the 1Miops level and it seemed like the system performance was entering the knee-of-the-curve
- Next up was the new VNX data app store demonstration. Similar to iPhone and Android App stores. EMC has identified a select set of apps that can be run directly on VNX hardware. The current demonstration had two versions of anti-virus, Recover Point Virtual Appliance (vRPA), (v?)VPLEX, CloudAccess and MySQL server. The engineers showed how AV software could be installed and be running on the VNX as well as how vRPA could be installed and provide onboard replication services.
- Then, they demonstrated a VNX virtual appliance (vVNX?) which was able to run on white box server which I think was running ESX. In this case, vVNX was running with onboard DAS storage but had all the advanced functionality of VNX
- Finally, they showed a vVNX running in a cloud services environment. Not sure if this was VMware vCloud or some other compute cloud but Rich stated that they will support many clouds. With vVNX running in the cloud accessing storage behind the compute engine it’s unclear what the performance would be and how one would access the storage (file or iSCSI no doubt) but it did open up new possibilities as to where one could run VNX services.
It’s readily apparent that the next iteration of VNX software seems focused on taking advantage of multi-core processing (called MCx) to boost storage system performance, providing a virtualized environment within the VNX engine to run specialized data services and supplying a new vVNX functionality which can be deployed just about anywhere you would want.
That’s all for the public sessions, spent much of the rest of the day in NDA sessions.
I had a good time at EMCworld 2013, seeing old friends again and meeting new ones and thank EMC for inviting me. For information on previous days at EMCworld 2013 please see my Day 1 and Day 2 posts.
