EMC Symmetrix V-Max

The latest member of the Symmetrix family - DMX Symmetrix V-Max is a new storage system to meet
green and virtual data center requirement.

The newer V-Max design is based on individual High Availability (HA) V-Max Engines with redundant
memory, CPU, and connectivity on two directors for fault tolerance. V-Max Engines connect to and scaleout linearly through the Virtual Matrix architecture, which allows resources to be shared within and across
V-Max Engines. To meet current and future Growth Requirements, additional V-Max Engines can be
added non-disruptively for efficient and dynamic scaling of capacity and performance that is available to
any application on demand.
Symmetrix V-Max is the only high-end platform with multi-core processors that provide maximum
performance and energy-efficient capabilities in each V-Max Engine. This unique feature allows entry-level
V-Max configurations to deliver significantly more performance in a smaller footprint than any other storage
array.

Figure 1: EMC DMX Symmetrix V-Max Series with Enginuity

The new Symmetrix V-Max series consists of two models:
Symmetrix V-Max SE (single engine) scales from 48 to 360 drives and is ideal for smaller capacity needs
that require the highest levels of performance, availability, and functionality.

Symmetrix V-Max provides linear scale-out of system resources96 to 2,400 drives and one to eight VMax Engines initially and is ideal for massive consolidation beyond the limits of a single Symmetrix
DMX-4 by:
Three times the capacityFlash, Fibre Channel, and SATA drives can be configured with a total
usable protected capacity of up to 2 PB in a single system.
Twice the connectivityUp to 128 host ports per frame versus 64 and capable of supporting
thousands of physical and virtual server connections combining Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and FICON.
Twice the performanceBased on 2.3 GHz multi-core processors that provide a significant increase in
processing power within a smaller footprint.

Management Abstraction Enables Ease, Speed, Automation

With this release, EMC is delivering a number of new capabilities and products that increase the ease and
speed with which you will be able to manage storage in virtual and physical environments, which translates
into real gains in operational efficiencies:

 New Auto-provisioning Groups combine tasks by device, port, and initiator to reduce time and
complexity by 95 percent. In virtual server environments applications running on V-Max arrays require a
fault tolerant environment with clustered servers as well as multiple paths to devices for guest Virtual
Machines (VMs).
Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning now has the ability to nondisruptively reclaim and reuse storage from a
previously allocated pool to make better use of existing capacity. When comparing the number of steps
and time required to provision capacity, customers using V-Max will be able to complete the same
operation in 96 percent fewer steps and 80 percent less time than if using the HDS USP (Universal
Storage Platform).
Virtual LUN - Virtual LUN technology enables data migration within an array without host or application
disruption and the ability to migrate data nondisruptively between any drive or RAID type as well as the
ability to schedule migrations. This means data can be automatically migrated between tiers to meet
changing requirements. This is very useful for applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning) that
experience limited activity throughout the quarter and sudden spikes in workload every 30 days due to
month-end processing. A critical capability of Virtual LUN is that it has no impact on remote replication.
EMC PowerPath enables the same level of dynamic load balancing and IO optimization in both physical
and virtualized environments. This provides key advantages over native path management solutions that
are complex to set up, have limited failover and load balancing features, and are complicated by mobility
technologies such as VMware VMotion, which can easily saturate an IO path, impacting performance
simply by moving a virtual machine.

EMC Symmetrix Thin Provisioning

Written by DuEL
Monday, 16 February 2009 00:01
inShare
Information is the fuel of todays enterprise. The SAN storage infrastructure required to store, access large
volumes of efficiently and simplify IT management process and improve storage capacity utilization.
When provisioning SAN storage for a new application, storage administrator must consider that
applications future capacity requirements rather than simply its current requirements. In order to reduce
the risk that SAN storage capacity will be exhausted, disrupting the application and business process, and
to reduce the number of times new storage must be provisioned for that application, organizations often
have allocated more physical SAN storage to an application than is needed for a significant amount of
time. This allocated but unused storage introduces acquisition and operational costs. Even with the most
careful planning, it often is necessary to provision additional storage in the future, which could potentially
require an application outage.
EMC Virtual Provisioning addresses these challenges. It builds on the base Thin Provisioning
functionality, which is the ability to have a large Thin device (volume), configured and presented to the

host while consuming physical storage from a shared pool only as needed. Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning
can improve storage capacity utilization and simplify storage requirement by presenting the application
with sufficient capacity for an extended period of time, reducing the need to provision new storage
frequently and avoiding costly allocated but unused storage.
Benefit of using EMC Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning
Ease and speed of provisioning
EMC Symmetrix Virtual Provisioning allow storage to be provisioned independently of the physical storage
infrastructure. By creating a thin device that initially is larger than required by the application, organization
can reduce the need to reprovision new SAN storage later on, as underlying physical storage consumption
increases automatically as needed. Without the need to reprovision additional storage frequently to
accommodate growth, there is also no need for any associated application outages, thereby increasing the
applications availability.
Improved Performance
Wide striping across the data device storage pool distributes I/O across more physical spindles than is the
case with many implementations of EMC symmetrix standard provisioning. Virtual Provisioning can
reduce disk contention and enhance application performance for certain workloads.

Improved Capacity utilization

When used with the appropriate applications, EMC symmetrix Virtual Provisioning can reduce the amount
of unused physical storage by having multiple thin devices share a single thin pool, drawing physical
storage from it only as needed. Storage administrators can avoid preallocating physical storage to
applications, which helps reduce storage costs and energy consumption.

Standard Provisioning VS Virtual Provisioning

The following example is the storage provisioning that we used in the past. Now, lets see what is the
different between Standard Provisioning and Virtual Provisioning.

Standard Provisioning

In the Standard Provisioning, to setup, the

storage administrator must create the device,
map, mask and perform host discovery and LVM.

Virtual Provisioning
Requires similar of steps the storage
administrator must create data device, adds them
to the thin pool, then creates the thin device and

Storage administrator map and masks the device

and perform host discovery and LVM.

The host-perceived capacity equals the

allocated capacity.

For storage capacity expansion, required

creating a new device and presenting it to the host
and so on.

binds it to the pool.

A large device can be perceived, but capacity
is allocated only as needed.
For storage capacity expansion, requires far
fewer steps and easier to grow. The data devices
can be created and added to the pool.

The steps to add capacity with EMC Symmetrix Standard Provisioning and EMC Symmetrix Virtual
Provisioning after initial setup.
Storage administrator can further simplify the growth process by creating command-line scripts that
automatically add data devices to a thin pool in response to alerts that are emitted when pool capacity
exceeds a percentage threshold. In either case storage administrator should closely monitor the space
consumption of the thin device and thin pool.