Comments on: EMC Symmetrix V-Max Is Neither Monolithic Nor Midrange

By: Dr. Wolfgang Voigt

Dr. Wolfgang Voigt — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 00:03:21 +0000

EMC is doing the splits between cost reduction by using commodity hardware and investment protection for the Engenuity firmware. An 3PAR-like solution ( splitting server-mapped volumes in a number of subvolumes behind the controller pairs and I/O delegation via a PCI mesh backplane ) would result in a complete rewriting of the firmware. The V-Max solution has the advantage that the Front-end, Back-end and Cache Director related firmware portions can now run as processes or daemons under the umbrella of an common operating system. This reduces the cost for firmware adoption greatly. Rapid I/O was selected because this protocol contains a lot of storage access control ( locking, messaging, semaphores etc. ). So it becomes possible to build up a unique cache space with the help of special ASICs which translate remote storage accesses in local ones. This is in fact no new idea, it seems only to be a new implementation of ccNUMA ( cache coherent non-uniform memory access ) used by Data General and Sequent in the past. EMC has done a paradigm shift from the Direct Matrix ( based on Ethernet SerDes chips ) to a Dual Fabric Rapid I/O network. In my opinion it would be much better to use the new Infiniband QDR host channel adapter and switch ( 36 ports with 4x 10 Gbps ) ASICs It is very likely that IBM is going this way to improve the XIV storage system. A big disadvantage of Rapid I/O is the maximal connection distance of 80cm. Therefore Rapid I/O is not the right platform to develop Multi-Site storage solutions based on the ideas of YottaYotta.

By: Dr. Wolfgang Voigt

Dr. Wolfgang Voigt — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:03:21 +0000

By: sfoskett

sfoskett — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:57:07 +0000

Indeed, as I said, V-Max is not a virtualization platform. However, it is fair for the company to claim that it is virtualized internally, and impressively so, since there is no link between physical and logical. And yes, I do think that calling it “V-Max” and saying virtual all over the place confuses the audience!

By: Vijay Ramaswamy

Vijay Ramaswamy — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:34:13 +0000

Infact V-Max is not a virtualization platform as the industry knows 'storage virtualization' today. It does not provide any of the benefits of heterogeneous external storage virtualization which it does not appear to do. Customers today have a lot of legacy assets with quite a bit of stranded storage. V-Max cannot help these customers reclaim stranded capacity or improve storage utilization or help with migration issues. V-Max provides a level of abstraction within a box which surely can be claimed as a type of 'virtualization' after all. Surely a good strategy on behalf of EMC to muddle of up and confuse the market.