the storage anarchist

4.004: vmax and vmaxe cameo appearances

Since its introduction in April 2009, VMAX has appeared in numerous television shows, news digests, movies and even Mayor Bloomberg's recent press conference announcing Gotham City's new centralized data centers. It seems that producers, directors and video reporters are attracted to the signature bold and blue facade that EMC's industrial design engineers created for the world's most Powerful, most Trusted and Smartest storage array.

You may have seen the following appearances (clockwise from top left):

• 24 (Fox)
• Nikita (CW Network)
• Covert Affairs (USA Network)
• Mayor Bloomberg's Press Conference on NYC's new City Agency data center
• 60 Minutes report on Speed Traders at NYSE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But wait! There's more!

4.003: a big thing in a small package

Imagine:

• Start with the world's most Powerful, Trusted and Smart enterprise storage array, hardened by almost 23 years of protecting the world's most critical information assets.
• Scale down its Intel-based infrastructure and dial-back its innovative scale-out architecture to optimize for less-demanding enterprise environments.
• Remove the layers of complexity associated with supporting legacy hosts such as mainframes and iSeries to simplify configuration and operations.
• Eliminate physical drive and RAID configuration altogether and pre-configure the array at the factory for pool-based Virtual Provisioning to radically simplify resource allocation and management while maximizing utilization efficiency.
• Allow customers to add factory-configured Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST VP) to further drive down the acquisition AND operational costs of both capacity AND performance.
• For local and remote data protection, include the world's most widely adopted heterogeneous Continuous Data Protection and Remote Replication capability, EMC RecoverPoint.
• Simplify the product installation to no more than a 4 hours to power-up, and 4 minutes to first I/O after the keys are handed over to the customer.
• Package that all in standard 19" racks configured to optimize floor tile utilization, requiring only single-phase power as evidence of reduced power requirements and deployment simplicity.
• Oh, and don't forget the trademark blue LED bar and one of those fancy little "e" thingies that the VNX guys introduced earlier this year.

What do you get?
 

4.002: Does page size matter -- a rebuttal

Hitachi Data System's CTO Hu Yoshida continues to try to defend the 42MB page size utilized by the Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT) on the VSP. Apparently his first attempts to put lipstick on the pig didn't go over so well, so now he has resorted to good-old competitive FUD as he tries to convince his readers that the smaller granularity employed by VMAX FAST VP (7.5MB) delivers poorer "cost performance" than HDT.

Hu's basic premise is that the smaller the page size, the larger the amount of metadata that has to be maintained. He (incorrectly) asserts that VMAX FAST VP requires 54 times as much metadata than does VSP HDT. Further, he claims that managing and checking all that metadata requires 54 times more CPU cycles, reducing performance. He also makes a rather outlandish claim that the smaller page size requires 54 times more data movement.

With all due respect to Hu, his claims are total hogwash!