EMC VNX

When EMC Corp. unveils its VNX unified storage platform Tuesday, it will sharpen the competition with NetApp – which offers block and file capabilities in its FAS platform – and kick off a debate over what is truly a unified system.

EMC hasn’t briefed media members on the new release, allowing its competitors to frame the debate in the week leading to the launch. NetApp bloggers and executives have taken the opportunity to position themselves as unified pioneers and hail their FAS systems as true unified storage and say EMC is merely following their lead.

EMC’s marketing materials position the VNX as its next generation of midrange systems, combining Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS into one brand. The system is more of a logical successor to Celerra, which already supported block and file storage, while Clariion was a block storage (Fibre Channel and iSCSI) platform. The real heavy lifting for consolidation of the brands came last August when EMC launched its Unisphere management software for both Clariion and Celerra, as well as FAST automated tiered storage and block compression for primary data.

 

Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NAS, object storage in one box

The VNX platform consists of the VNX7500 and four configurations of the VNX5000 series. The VNX7500 is the first member of a 7000 series. The launch also includes VNXe3100 and VNXe3300 storage systems for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The VNX7500 replaces the Clariion CX4-960 and Celerra NS-960 at the high end of EMC’s midrange offerings. The VNX5000 systems replace the CX4-480, CX4-240, CX4-120 and Clariion AX4 Fibre Channel and NS-480, NS-120 systems. VNXe systems replace the AX4 iSCSI and NX4 systems.

The VNX5000 systems range from the VNX5100 with 75 maximum drives to the VNX5700 with 500 drives. The VNX7500 can hold 100 drives. The systems support 3.5-inch Flash solid-state, 6 Gbps SAS and NL-SAS capacity drives, and 2.5-inch SAS and Flash drives will be supported in future releases. All the midrange systems have two controllers.

The midrange systems support file (NFS, CIFS, pNFS), block (Fibre Channel, iSCSI) and object storage, and EMC software such as its FAST automated tiering and RecoverPoint replication support block and file data. EMC is renaming FAST as FAST VP (Virtual Pools) for both the VNX and Symmetrix high-end enterprise family. EMC also claims simple conversions when going from block-only or file-only systems to unified systems.

EMC will rebrand its G2 and G8 Celerra Gateways as the VNX Gateways. The gateways can sit behind up to four VNX, Clariion or EMC Symmetrix VMAX systems in any combination.