A Storage Field Day, René van den Bedem got an update from Dell EMC. They specifically focused on PowerMax, their evolution of VMAX All Flash now with NVMe. René looks at why PowerMax still represents the best option for legacy 3-tier hardware and mission-critical legacy applications.
PowerMax, VMAX, XtremIO – the Agony of Choice
Chris Evans looks at Dell EMC’s newly announced PowerMax, an all-NVMe storage array. When fully configured, PowerMax can hit up to 10 million IOPS at under 300 microseconds of latency, while still being able to access the mature data service of their VMAX line. Chris raises a similar to point to Dell EMC’s XtremeIO presentation at Storage Field Day last year, that with many families of storage arrays, Dell EMC needs to be very clear which line is best for prospective customers.
The Yin Yang of Dell EMC Storage
Jon Hildebrand takes a look at what he heard from Dell EMC’s storage team at Tech Field Day last month. Overall he saw the company’s XtremIO team taking a page out of the VMAX playbook, emphasizing calm growth with their XtremIO 2 platform, learning lessons from the initial growing pains of the platform. Jon sees this as a way to move the platform into the self-described “boring reliability” of VMAX.
ScaleIO Becomes Software Defined on Hardware
Chris Evans got to see a bit from Dell EMC’s ScaleIO division last year. But the company has decided to shake up the offering by taking the former software product, and tying it directly to VxRack hardware. This comes after a reorganization for the company, that seems to show them focusing more strictly on hardware sales.
Storage is boring
After hearing from DellEMC on their XtremeIO and VMAX solutions at Tech Field Day, Keith discusses why storage is boring. Of course, for the enterprise, boring is not a bad thing.
Dell EMC High-End Storage Presents at Tech Field Day 16
We had the priviledge to have Scott Delandy present with Dell EMC at Tech Field Day last week. He discussed the evolution of high end storage over the last three decade. This included a look at the “boring because it just works” VMAX updates, and why boring is actually cool.
What Next for XtremIO?
Chris Evans heard from Dell EMC’s XtremIO team at Storage Field Day late last year. In this post, he digs into the history of the platform, discussing how their X2 release addressed customer concerns and added better compression from the initial XtremIO X1 solution. Dell EMC is committed to supporting XtremIO long term, but Chris discusses where exactly the solution fits in the modern enterprise.
Dell EMC VMAX All-Flash: A proven solution for mission-critical systems
Max) Mortillaro shares a great piece inspired by Dell EMC’s recent Storage Field Day presentation on their VMAX All-Flash array. He starts out by outlining the how and why organizations define what exactly are mission-critical applications. This naturally leads into a discussion of VMAX All-Flash, which Max describes as “a perfect fit for mission-critical systems”. He digs into how this third iteration of VMAX adds some useful new features for those organizations that need highly available Tier-1 storage.
XtremIO X2: easier scaling, fewer cables and metadata aware replication
After seeing Dell EMC’s presentation at Storage Field Day last year, Jon Klaus shares his thoughts on their XtremIO X2 storage array. Jon sees several interesting features compared to its predecessor. Among other features, Jon liked the improved flexibility when scaling storage, including offering XtremIO X2 Bricks with only partially populated disks. This makes it easier for new customers to adopt. XtremIO X2 also offers improved 5:1 data reduction, which can be achieved without a performance penalty due to its “inline everything” architecture.
VMAX All Flash: Enterprise reliability and SRDF at <1ms latency
Jon Klaus gives an overview of Dell EMC’s all flash VMAX storage array, which he saw at Storage Field Day earlier this year. This brings sub 1ms latency and high IOPS to the already reliable line.
Four Platforms When One Will Do?
After getting a review of their mid-range storage offerings at Storage Field Day last month, Chris Evans tries to makes sense of Dell EMC’s portfolio. This includes the SC-series, Unity, VNX and EqualLogic. The last two will be phased out as the result of the Dell EMC merger. Chris breaks down the rationale behind keeping two distinct mid-range lines, highlighting major differentiation like file protocols and deduplication support.
vMax to the Max
Dell EMC went into a technical deep dive on VMAX during their presentation at Storage Field Day earlier this year. Erik Ableson looks at their recently released all-flash VMAX, and considers the current state of “big iron” and how something like VMAX fits into the world of the modern storage admin.
VMAX – The Mainframe of Storage
In this piece, Chris Evans compares Dell EMC’s VMAX storage array to classic mainframe computing. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but is actually astute praise. Like the mainframe, VMAX caters to legacy applications that need industry leading high availability and performance. In that niche, the new All-Flash VMAX array performs excellent, and Chris would recommend for the right legacy workloads.
Dell-EMC VMAX All Flash Review
At Storage Field Day last week, the delegates got to see presentations from a number of Dell EMC divisions, including an update on their flagship VMAX All Flash array. René van den Bedem thinks the platforms long legacy of high performance and availability makes it a no-brainer for organizations that need five 9s or greater availability on a 3-tier storage platform .
DellEMC SC progressing well
At Storage Field Day, Chin-Fah Heoh and the other delegates got a look at Dell EMC’s SC series midrange storage arrays, which came out of the company’s acquisition of Compellent back in 2010. The presentation highlighted the arrays RAID Tiering and All-Flash SC hardware lineup.
Dell EMC
Dell acquired EMC in 2016, forming Dell EMC as part of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC owns a majority stake in VMware. See also: Dell Technologies EMC Dell VMware
