I've had a quick look over the specifications of the new DMX-4 compared to the DMX-3. There aren't really a lot of changes. The backend director connectivity has been upped to 4Gb/s and presumably that's where the 30% throughput improvement comes from (with some Enginuity code changes too I guess).
There are a number of references to energy efficiency, however the "old" and "new" DMX cooling figures are the same and power figures are almost identical. The improved energy efficiency I think is being touted due to the availability of 750GB SATA drives for DMX (not now but later) but in reality that's not going to be a significant saving unless you're filling your entire array with SATA drives. One statement I want to validate is the following:
"Symmetrix DMX-4 is the most energy efficient enterprise storage array in the world, using up to 70 percent less power than competitive offerings."
There are some security enhancements - but there would have to be in order to justify the RSA purchase....
On the positive side, having the option of SATA drives is a good thing - I'd use them for Timefinder copies or dump areas. I wouldn't fill an array with them though.
Perhaps the most surprising announcement is (in green for extra emphasis):
In addition, EMC plans to introduce thin provisioning capabilities for Symmetrix DMX in the first quarter of 2008, enabling customers to further improve storage utilization and simplify storage allocation while continuing to improve energy efficiency.
Whoa there, I thought from all the recent posts (especially this) that Virtualisation/Thin Provisioning was something to be used with care. It will be interesting to see how EMC blogkets this one...
Tuesday 17 July 2007
DMX-4
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2 comments:
hehe, that is funny :)
I would be interested in a more in depth analysis of the new offerings from you though!
Thin Provisioning is indeed something to be used with care - this is not an implementation-specific statement, nor would it be an excuse not to provide it to our customers.
And as we announced at EMC World back in May, thin provisioning will be supported across all of EMC's storage platforms. Celerra has supported thin provisioning since January 2006, and we'll be building the capability for the Symmetrix and CLARiiON platforms based on our experiences from that implementation, along with customer input and feedback on competitor's offerings.
The Symmetrix implementation (targeted for Q1'08) will support local and remote replication out of the chute, and you'll be able to use both FC and SATA storage (although you'll probably want to create separate tiers with different drive & protection types). Perhaps more importantly, it will be available for both the DMX-3 and the DMX-4 platforms.
I'll try to give more details on my blog, but the launch has kept us pretty busy around the office. Hopefully I'll get my next post up by the end of the week...
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