EMC Raises Performance of VNX in Mission Critical Microsoft and Oracle Environments

EMC Corporation raised the performance bar for unified storage with new options that scale the VNX to new levels of bandwidth, transactional performance, and capacity density for environments requiring high level of performance and availability for demanding, mission critical Oracle and Microsoft SQL data warehousing and OLTP workloads, as well as high end video production and seismic interpretation for oil and gas.

EMC has achieved 14GB/s high bandwidth with a dual VNX7500/single rack configuration, introduced a new high bandwidth option for the VNX5500, a new dense rack configuration with 3TB drives, and a new Flash VNX5500-F. These new options – designed to boost performance, efficiency and cost savings in mission critical environments – build upon the EMC VNX series, which is powered by the quad-core Intel Xeon processor 5600 series and use Flash drives as both a performance storage tier and as a caching tier that is managed by the EMC Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) Suite.

Technology Details

• High Bandwidth Option for VNX5500: EMC enhanced the VNX Series with a new high bandwidth option available on the VNX5500 – delivering 6.5 GB/s performance – a 50% performance improvement. The system is optimized for high bandwidth data warehousing applications from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle, as well as high end video production and seismic interpretation for oil and gas. The option adds 4 ports of 6GB/s four lane SAS for disk connections. The new option for the VNX5500 complements the VNX portfolio, which at the high end with the VNX7500 currently offers up-to 14 GB/s bandwidth.
• Dense Configuration: The VNX series now offers a new dense rack configuration and new 3 TB NL-SAS drives – shrinking 1.6 PB of information per floor tile – offering flexibility for customers with floor space constraints or large amounts of less active data. The configuration utilizes a dense drive chassis (60 drives in 4U) and the option of Flash, SAS and near-line SAS drives.
• Flash EMC VNX5500-F: The EMC VNX5500-F is designed for five-9’s availability, a requirement for mission critical Microsoft and Oracle OLTP workloads. The new system delivers 10X the performance and 80% lower cost per TPM (transactions per minute) compared to an all-HDD EMC VNX system in Oracle OLTP environments. As a member of the EMC VNX series, the VNX5500-F delivers data integrity, multiple RAID options, and proactive global sparing and diagnostics. Software suites also provide local and remote data protection, application protection, security and compliance. 

Patrick Williams, Systems Specialist at NC State University, said: "As with any organization with a budget and limited space, we’re always searching for data center solutions that are simple, powerful, efficient – and help manage our costs. The density and ability to squeeze 1.6 PBs of data into just one floor tile in our data center is impressive. EMC now has the option to free up data center floor space – and reduce overall power consumption dramatically. It’s impressive."

Dennis Robinson, Director, Technical Infrastructure GENEX, said: "Our business and success is measured by our ability to serve our customers – providing insurers, employers and third party administrators with managed care solutions and information management capabilities. We currently use the EMC VNX unified storage systems to scale our IT infrastructure and get the most out of our VMware and our Oracle environment. For environments where data availability and high performance are crucial, a Flash unified storage system like the VNX5500-F would be an ideal option."

David Vellante, President & Co-founder at Wikibon.org, said: "Virtualizing mission critical Oracle and Microsoft SQL-based applications is a conversation of increasing importance amongst practitioners in the Wikibon community. A key consideration for these customers is predictable performance which is particularly difficult to achieve with virtualized systems. The data explosion is so enormous that it’s becoming impossible to manually manage hot spots. As such, organizations are demanding efficient storage infrastructure that supports automated operations. With this announcement, EMC is stepping up to the challenge of evolving a proven and reliable VNX platform with innovations such as flash and automated tiering to support emerging client needs."  

Rich Napolitano, President, EMC Unified Storage Division, said: "As the storage market leader, EMC is now extending the simplicity, efficiency and performance of the VNX unified storage series to provide customers with mission critical Oracle and Microsoft environments with the high-performance and five-9’s availability they require. Today we’re building upon EMC’s unique ability to help customers exploit the costs and performance efficiencies of Flash technology with the VNX5500-F.  Additionally, for bandwidth-intensive applications like Oracle or Microsoft data warehousing, we’ve improved both the throughput and storage density. Today’s news is another calculated move by EMC to deliver customers the technologies they need to do more with less."