EMC, a provider of information
infrastructure solutions, announced the release of a family of unified storage
systems—EMC VNX.
The new storage solutions consolidate the features and functionality of EMC
CLARiiON and EMC Celerra into a single
family of unified storage arrays that scale from entry-level to data center-class
systems.
The VNXe (for entry) series is designed specifically for small to medium-size
businesses (SMBs), as well as a department-level storage solution for
enterprises, and remote or branch offices. The VNX
family is currently available for order and will be available in the first
quarter of 2011 worldwide from EMC and EMC
Velocity channel partners.
The VNXe series, which starts at under $10,000, offers provision storage for
hundreds of Microsoft Exchange Server mailboxes, or a 1TB VMware data store, in
less than 2 minutes, according to a company release. The platform also provides
automated diagnosis, service and technical support information in a single
click. The VNX family is optimized for
virtual applications, designed with Intel multicore processor technology, and
also introduces software packages for simplified management and data
protection.
“IT organizations are under extreme pressure to reduce costs and deliver more
efficient IT services. In addition, the expectation for simpler IT is at an
all-time high and is dissolving traditional silos at larger companies.
Meanwhile, small and midsized organizations are facing similar pressures but
with fewer in-house skills,” said David Vellante, chief research advocate at
Wikibon.org. “Our financial models show that by bringing together CLARiiON and
Celerra, EMC's VNX
series will allow practitioners to reduce costs and accelerate IT delivery;
while the VNXe series will enable small and midsized organizations to
essentially deliver IT as a service without specialized storage skill sets.”
EMC Unisphere, a centralized interface,
manages both the VNXe series and VNX series.
The VNXe systems are designed for IT professionals with little storage
expertise. Its wizard-based setup and application-centric provisioning is
designed to enable customers to configure storage for 500 Exchange mailboxes—or
1TB of VMware data stores—in just a few minutes.
“This is the most significant midrange announcement in EMC’s
30-year history. It is a critical piece of EMC’s
strategy of architecting our storage solutions to be optimized for virtualized
environments,” said Rich Napolitano, president of EMC’s
unified storage division. “The VNX family
sets the stage for all of our future products in EMC’s
midrange portfolio.”
The VNXe platform features include application-based provisioning wizards,
including support for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Hyper-V; compact 2U and
3U packaging; built-in support for file-based (CIFS, NFS)
and block-based (iSCSI) storage; built-in data protection, including
replication; efficiency features including thin provisioning; file
deduplication and compression; integrated self-help and support infrastructure,
designed to automate and speed problem resolution; and 6G-bps SAS and Nearline
SAS drive support. In addition, the platform is scalable up to 120 disk drives
(240TB).
“For storage specialists, we’ve converged the best attributes of the market-leading
SAN (with EMC
CLARiiON) and NAS (with EMC Celerra) storage
systems into one powerful new platform—armed with the industry’s most advanced
automated tiering software to exploit the benefits of SSDs,” Napolitano said.
“For IT generalists, EMC brings tremendous
simplicity and enterprise-class storage to SMBs—affordably.”
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