31 July 2010
Saturday
EMC World 2009 highlights Symmetrix V-Max
By Beth Pariseau | May 19, 2009
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PrintCustomers attending the EMC World 2009 conference said they'll be looking for more information about the new Symmetrix V-Max array, and watching for updates on Clariion, VMware integration and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Attendees at the opening reception Sunday night said they were interested in finding out more about the systems EMC has launched since last year's EMC World.
"We're interested in looking at V-Max for its potential integration with VMware," said Danghuy Nguyen, enterprise systems manager at the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corp. (NRUCFC) in Herndon, Va. Nguyen said the ability to do virtual provisioning and provision according to policy groups rather than by individual server "could take [server] virtualization to the next level and ease management for administrators."
Steve Hunt, systems architect at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said he's intrigued by Atmos, EMC's object-based scale-out storage system. "We're trying to figure out how to start dealing with objects – with data as something that isn't owned by a particular server," Hunt said.
Nguyen and Hunt said they're also interested in refining data management policies by comparing notes with other users. For Nguyen, those policies would be for archiving data for long-term retention. Hunt is looking at policies to improve tiered storage and day-to-day data management.
"We've been tiering storage for years, but you're really not dealing with it until you decide what your overall business policies are," Hunt said.
A closer look at modular arrays
Other EMC customers reached by SearchStorage.com before the show said they're most interested in getting a closer look at V-Max's distributed architecture, with some seeing it as an alternative to deploying multiple smaller modular arrays.
"I want to look under the hood," said Ryan Perkowski, storage manager at a leading credit card issuer in the U.S. who asked that his company not be identified because corporate policy forbids him to represent it in the media. "I have my doubts and suspicions," he said. "With the way they divide up the backplane, I can imagine incurring some level of latency." However, Perkowski said he'd be looking for a deep dive to address his doubts at the show.
Others said they'd like to see a similar overhaul for Clariion.
"I'd like to see it [Clariion] get the same treatment that [Symmetrix] V-Max did in terms of using SSD drives as a 'hot' region and moving lesser-used data out to spinning disk when possible to make the whole thing seem much faster," said Michael Passe, storage manager at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "This probably would use thin provisioning in some way to provide this ability. It may not be this year or next, but I would like to see that type of capability come to [Clariion] CX for some of my more IO-intensive applications as we move away from Symm and toward an all-Clariion shop."
This article originally appeared on SearchStorage.com
