Dell EMC: VMAX 250F Enterprise-Class All-Flash Storage

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies. announced the launch of products designed to help bring enterprise all-flash storage to a broader set of customers.

VMAX 250F

Building on the performance and reliability of the VMAX family, the VMAX 250F delivers an enterprise all-flash array with game-changing economics. The company is delivering improved storage economics across its entire VMAX all flash array portfolio with its latest HYPERMAX OS update, which includes inline compression to increase storage efficiency. The firm also introduced the VPLEX for All-Flash platform, that is inclusive of the software and capacity licenses required to provide the continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility of the latest VPLEX VS6 platform to the modern all-flash datacenter.

VMAX 250F
The VMAX 250F leverages firm’s experience of developing enterprise-scale VMAX all flash arrays to deliver a performance system that meets the specifications of organizations with enterprise standards and mid-market budgets.

VMAX 250F is:

Enterprise: The VMAX 250F delivers all of the performance, availability, and data services that customers have come to expect from the VMAX family of storage arrays
Powerful: Scaling up to 1PB of effective capacity and over one million IO/s with sub-millisecond response times; supports 7.6 and 15TB enterprise flash drives
Scalable: Based on V-Brick architecture, each VMAX 250F V-Brick starts at 11TB and scales up to 1PB
Compact: A fully configured VMAX 250F provides up to 64 host ports and is space efficient. Each fully loaded VMAX 250F V-Brick is 10U and a loaded two-V-Brick system requires 20U of space and fits in half of a standard rack
Efficient: The expansive catalog of VMAX data services such as inline compression, SRDF, D@RE, eNAS, e-management, NDM are available on the VMAX 250F
XpectMore program: With inclusion in the XpectMore program, VMAX 250F customers can enjoy lifetime protection and a three-year money-back guarantee.

“The VMAX platform is known for and relied upon for mission-critical applications by companies worldwide,” said Fidelma Russo, SVP and GM, enterprise storage and software, Dell EMC. “Recognizing that application requirements vary in scale from very large to mid-size, we designed the VMAX 250F to bring the VMAX brand and proven reliability to a broader set of customers. And, with the introduction of the updated Dell EMC HYPERMAX OS, the entire VMAX all flash family will enjoy the benefits of inline compression and non-disruptive migration.“

HYPERMAX OS
Like the entire VMAX family of AFAs, the VMAX 250F will benefit from the release of the HYPERMAX OS. HYPERMAX delivers:

Inline compression: Operating at a granular level, customers will be able to target workloads that benefit the most from compression, including data that was written prior to HYPERMAX updates. Inline compression and data reduction capabilities deliver reduced footprint and cost savings by reducing storage requirements by up to 4x compared to a configuration without data reduction
Non-disruptive migration: In just three steps, the HYPERMAX can deliver non-disruptive data migration from previous generation VMAX arrays to VMAX3 and VMAX all flash arrays. HYPERMAX also enables users to migrate live application data as well as revert to the source array, both in a non-disruptive fashion
Virtual ‘witness’: The release of HYPERMAX includes updates to SRDF/Metro, which reduces footprint and cost and eliminates the requirement for additional hardware by offering a virtual ‘witness’ to deliver an active/active data center
Third site support: SRDF/Metro updates in HYPERMAX will support asynchronous third-site support to provide DR over geo distances to a tertiary site.

The launch of the HYPERMAX software coincides with a OpenStack Newton Cinder release for VMAX. This underscores company’s commitment to the OpenStack storage community, and extends VMAX’s capabilities in the all-flash market

VPLEX for All-Flash
The VS6 platform of VPLEX, solution for continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility, takes a performance leap to meet the needs of all-fash environments. VPLEX VS6 delivers twice the performance at one-third the latency and provides much greater scale than previous generations. VPLEX VS6 is optimized for flash with UNMAP support for thin provisioning, XCOPY support and Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) support across active-active datacenters.

The firm is also introducing an all-inclusive VPLEX solution exclusively for all-flash arrays: VPLEX for All-Flash. With VPLEX For All-Flash, the software license is tied to a VPLEX engine without any limitations on the capacity or the number of Dell EMC flash arrays protected, making it a cost effective option for customers to extend VPLEX capabilities to their growing all-flash workloads. Thanks to its scale-out architecture, customers can non-disruptively add additional VPLEX engines to support the performance requirements of multiple all-flash systems.

The VS6 platform and VPLEX For All-Flash solution have been designed to enable customers to modernize their datacenters with continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility. VPLEX adds seven-nines availability to mission-critical workloads for performance intensive all-flash systems.

Faster time-to-value, less cost
The company has made a suite of services available to help customers accelerate the value of their VMAX 250F and VPLEX for all flash investments. In addition to expert deployment services the firm offers Intelligent Data Mobility migration services that, when combined with the non-disruptive migration capability of HYPERMAX, can reduce data migration time and expense by up to 65%. Customers can also take advantage of a proactive, predictive customer service, which provides support throughout the product lifecycle and also offers access to capabilities such as MyService360, which delivers personalized visualization on the health and wellness of the Dell EMC environment.

Uli Betzler, storage architect, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), said: “We’ve been Dell EMC customers for a long time and use products from across its portfolio of storage solutions. Dell EMC VMAX 250F takes up an important place in that portfolio for us. As a research institute, not all of our workloads are enormous, but they are all critical. So, while we need the performance and reliability of a VMAX for all of our arrays, we didn’t need the scale of a VMAX for every one. The VMAX 250F will allow us to access the proven capabilities of the VMAX family in a new range of environments where the economics now really work.“

Ned Jones, director, IT, RC Willey Home Furnishing, said: “Our business goal is to deliver exceptional selection, value, superior service and professional associates that really care about our customers. Maintaining and managing customer data is key to our ability to meet those goals so we are constantly handling greater and greater volumes of information. Dell EMC’s new version of HYPERMAX makes it simple for us to update our data center to take advantage of flash, it also introduces incredible levels of inline compression. That means we can keep growing the volumes of data that drives benefits for our customers, without needing more space, more power or more costs.“

Mark Peters, practice director and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: “The market for all-flash arrays continues to grow – in both established and emerging sectors. But ‘all-flash’ per se is ceasing to be a differentiator between vendors as software, application integration and proven capabilities instead become the critical decision factors. This translates into prospective customers that are demanding more concrete evidence from vendors to know not just how much a terabyte of storage is going to cost them, but if a specific storage system matches their precise needs. Vendors have the greatest likelihood of succeeding in the evolving flash storage market if they have a portfolio of flash solutions where economic needs can be balanced against storage volume and functional prerequisites in order to find the right fit for each customer’s needs.“

Sachin Gupta, VP, data center and enterprise switching, Cisco Technology, Inc., said: “Cisco and Dell EMC are committed to delivering solutions that offer extreme levels of performance, scale and availability. Dell EMC’s announcement of the VMAX 250F expands the VMAX all flash portfolio from high-end enterprise to a new group of customers. Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Networking platform offers a combination of performance, non-stop operations, investment protection and flexibility which is the perfect complement to the VMAX 250F enabling organizations to modernize and transform their data center.“

Scott Miller, director, data center, World Wide Technology, Inc. (WWT), said: “The question our customers face is no longer ‘flash or spinning?’ but ‘Which flash?’ Dell EMC’s flash portfolio approach means that there’s a flash solution to match every use case. The launch of the VMAX 250F hits a sweet spot for organizations that require enterprise features at an affordable price point. WWT is proud to showcase the VMAX 250F array in our Advanced Technology Center’s Flash Lab. Dell EMC’s new HYPERMAX software for VMAX not only simplifies the process of migrating customers to an all-flash environment, but it also reduces the required storage capacity thanks to inline compression. This, in turn, delivers performance benefits and can save our customers money.“