EMC XtremIO, VMAX and Isilon get new CPUs and data services

EMC has announced several hardware product upgrades centred on a move to Intel Ivy Bridge CPU for boosted performance and new models, with improved data services in its XtremIO all-flash array, VMAX enterprise SAN and Isilon scale-out NAS products.

The XtremIO all-flash array product range has new additions to the family in the form of a 5TB “baby X-brick” expandable to 10TB and a six X-Brick cluster for 120TB total capacity.

The XIOS 3.0 operating system (OS) has been upgraded with the addition of new data services. These include: AES256 hardware-accelerated data-at-rest encryption; compression that EMC claims will give a 2x to 4x data reduction rate for database workloads, for example claiming 540TB from 90TB of physical capacity, and; “zero overhead” snapshots that update changed blocks and don’t rewrite metadata.

These new storage functions come in addition to existing thin provisioning, data deduplication and data protection services.

EMC also announced converged server/storage/networking vBlock systems would be available with XtremIO storage.

EMC’s VMAX enterprise SAN arrays have been given a facelift with better performance from Ivy Bridge processors and new model designations, the 100K, 200K and 400K products, the latter of which scales to 3.2PB.

Meanwhile, VMAX gets new controller software – Hypermax – dubbed a “storage hypervisor” by EMC. This adds data services to VMAX, including a “dynamic virtual matrix” capability that sees CPU cores and memory performance allocated to where they are needed according to user-set policy-based provisioning that gives service levels based on, for example, response time, latency and IOPS.

Hypermax OS also incorporates Protectpoint, which gives backups from the SAN direct to backup hardware, bypassing traditional backup infrastructure.

EMC also announced upgrades to its Isilon scale-out NAS product family. These include incorporation of Ivy Bridge processors and new models – the S210 and X410 – arrays aimed at transactional and high throughput workloads respectively, as well as a new iteration of the OneFS OS.

The S210 offers up to 3.75 million IOPS in a 144 node cluster while the X410 offers a claimed 200GB/second per cluster.

EMC also announced SmartFlash, which provides flash as cache in Isilon systems.

A key new feature announced is the planned addition of new storage access methods to Isilon. SMB access is available immediately with the Hadoop big data file system HDFS and OpenStack open source cloud storage access promised for later this year.