Ask the Expert: Learn Your Guide to Survival in the Transforming World of IT from the EMC Experts

Good Morning!  Thank you for joining our Ask the Experts session.  Last week during EMC World our division announced several new products and features that will help you survive in this ever changing world of big data. Our Senior Vice President discusses those announcements in this video. We also have a full micro-site full of everything you need to know about what was announced.  You can find that by clicking here.

This space is for you to get technical and take a deep dive in to the new announcements with our experts.  They are standing by to take all your questions. Please ask away!

My name is Brian Henderson.  I run the VNX Product Marketing Team and I am active on twitter - @bhendu and I am on the Spiceworks community talking about VNX and VNXe products.  

At EMC World last week, a lot of people last week were introduced to the All Flash VNXe3200 and vVNX Community Edition.

Here's a couple posts on it

Chad's Virtual Geek Blog

Pulse Blog by Jeff Boudreau

Hope you enjoyed the posts - feel free to ask me anything!

My Name is Paul Martin,  I am a Principal Corporate Systems Engineer in the Core Technologies Division,Working out of the Cork office in Ireland. I've been with EMC over 10 years and have had various roles in that time all Symmetrix and VMAX focused. I tend to focus on local and remote replication and the management software for VMAX but am not limited to those topics.   

Like Andy I don't seem to have a bio above but I do have a twitter handle @rawstorage.  I'm happy to answer anything I can on here.  Welcome to the Ask the Experts Forum.

Frank - During our #LoungeChats we had the question:  How does the new FAST.X for VMAX3 extend storage tiering to XtremIO or other arrays? Can you share the answer within our Ask the Experts discussion?

Hi guys thanks for doing this, they are always very useful. Couple of questions:

Adding VMAX data services to XtremIO and Cloud array is a huge win but how specifically will these platforms be consumed behind the VMAX3 - as a separate pool or within a pool with internal drives?

Do we know if there is any performance and storage efficiency impact to XtremIO with FAST.X?

How do we see FAST.X and cloud array will be used, the main concern being cloud array performance impact serving primary VMAX3 data that may be sitting in the cloud?

Will we support public and private clouds with Cloud array?

Do we have a list of  the 3rd party arrays that are planned to be supported?

I think thats enough for now:-) Thanks again guys.

vVNX was announced last week at EMC World?  Can you tell the discussion followers what vVNX is and the benefits?

Thanks for asking about vVNX or Virtual VNX. This was announced last year at EMC World where you may remember it referred to as Project Liberty. Well that "project" is now a reality in it's first implementation phase - vVNX Community Edition for evaluation and non-production use. vVNX is a free downloadable virtualized version of the VNXe unified (file and block) software stack that's built for VMware ESX. It includes a community-based support model for your software defined storage requirements that also provides you with a consistent VNX experience that you are used to. This Community Edition implementation is targeted for the development and test (non-production) of applications where you can quickly create multiple VNX instances without storage hardware and test data replication without multiple hardware platforms.

Here's a video to watch about vVNX

Download it now and try it for yourself!

Great, thanks Vince.

Our #LoungeChats had many people wondering... With the recent VMAX 3 introduction and the hype around the XtremIO all flash array, where does VNX fit in?

Hi Jamie,

The single word I'd use to describe the VNX compared with other members of the EMC portfolio is FLEXIBILITY. 

VNX provides you with the deployment flexibility to cover the widest range of mixed workloads while preparing for a service oriented approach towards IT.  from vVNX to a 1500 drive VNX 8000 system, we've got you covered.  It provides the best value per dollar compared to any array from EMC’s portfolio and is the preferred storage solution for many types of industry.

The three parts that make up flexibility include Unified Storage, Hybrid Flash, and Cloud Ready.

1. Unified Storage means it’s perfect for wide range of file and block use cases

• Configure as DAS, SAN or NAS
• Supports FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS
• We will look to add support for more data types as they become more established.

2. Hybrid Flash means it’s designed to automatic adapt to changing workloads -

• Supports tiered SSD/HDD to provide best $/workload solution
• Supports Flash as cache and supports Flash as a tier

3. Cloud Ready

• Built for private and hybrid cloud
• #1 in virtualization integration
• Deep hybrid cloud/ViPR integration

and it provides all of this Flexibility with No Compromise Economics.

As a customer I am seeing that VNX gets no love compared to other platforms in your portfolio. Look at support of layered applications like Snapview/MirrorView, you are stuck with limitations back from late 1990s. You still do not have support for 64bit file systems so you are limited to 16TB file system. Other mid-tier vendors are leaving you in the dust when it comes to services (dedupe, compression). So what's the plan ?

the 16 TB limit is very dated, we have to use alternative vendors because of this limitation as when we explain this to our customers, we get raised eyebrows and get asked why we are using dated technology.

staying tuned, next time could use less marketing fluff (this is a support community after all, not sales kick off meeting)

Dynamox,

I can see how you might get the impression that VNX is not getting the love these days, no growling cages or media hype that was done in the  past.  But every EMC product gets it’s time in the limelight, it just wasn’t our turn this year.  But this doesn’t mean that VNX has been standing still since the Sept 2013 MCx launch.

VNX continues to be the most flexible platform in EMC portfolio today, and remains EMC’s premier product by leading the way for new customer acquisition.

Did you know that VNX makes up 73% of all new EMC storage customers for Q1 2015?   

Along the way we’ve enhanced software functionality to include over 95+ points of integration with virtual machines, integrated technologies such as VPLEX, RecoverPoint a Data Domain for the most  complete solution on the market. 

But I can tell you we’re not done yet, we’ve had record levels of quality with over 94% of overall customer satisfaction, and quietly introduced  product enhancements like Data in Place block upgrades to simplify customer migration, increased flash capacities, new aggressively priced software packages while being one of the most economical mid-range product for mixed workloads on the market today.

Since I’m not allowed to divulge future enhancements, let me just say don’t be surprised if you see some VNX announcements on some efficiencies features in 2015. 

Please stay tuned.

Sure, my bad !