back to article EMC to release hot flood of unifying products

EMC will introduce VNX5000 and VNX7500 products unifying its CLARiiON and Celerra mid-range storage arrays, according to documents seen by El Reg. The CLARiiON range is in its fourth CX4 generation and EMC's mainstream block-access storage array. It is accompanied by the Celerra NX4 and NX3e block and file-access array which …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    storage commenter

    To the Reg: please don't let EMC fool you with a "2TB SAS disk drives" - if this is the same as Sun/Oracle's marketing, the 2TB SAS drive is a 2TB enterprise SATA class drive with a SAS interface tacked on. This means the MTBF/AFR of the 2TB SAS drive is about 75% as good as a real 600GB SAS drive and the bit error rate is 10x with the 2TB drive vs a 600GB SAS. These figures are for Seagate 10k/15k SAS vs 7.2k Constellation SAS drives.

    To Reg readers: EMC's new "unified" storage offering still runs Flare (Clariion) and Dart (Celerra) operating systems on top of a VMware hypervisor. They're putting it in the same chassis and hiding the heterogeneous foundation as best as they can, but you still have 2 OSes and all the negatives that entails. 2 OSes and VMware in the same chassis - kudos EMC on your "unification"! ;) qpzm11

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Being EMC

    Each feature will have to be licensed separately and will cost six figures a pop plus five figures a year in maintenance per feature, and EMC will refuse to support it if you connect it to a NetApp in any fashion. Oh, and the cost for storage will be in the $10K/GB range.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Troll

      Argh, another biggot.

      Come on AC. FUD!

      I hate FUD, it means one or both of two things:

      1. You don't know what your talking about or; (you've never delt with EMC)

      2. You're lying through your teeth! (you work for or exclusively with NetApp)

      Either way, you're opinion is invalid.

      FlexVol, FlexCache, Asis, Compression, SnapManager for what ever, nup, none of them free, or cheap for that matter. In fact, last I checked, pricings about the same.

      As a certified "expert" (What ever thats supposed to mean) in NetApp, EMC and HDS; and as a pre-sales engineer in all the above, I can honestly say there is little between them.

      (NetApp's overall initial Purchase is typically a little MORE expensive than EMC)

      The minor diferences however can mean a whole lot to your environment, however.

      NetApp's Asis and Write coelesing into NVRam do very little in a video intense environment.

      Now as for placing an EMC array behind a NetApp V-Series gateway, EMC will tend to provide best effort support, upto the the last point of connectivity before the v-Series. Which I completely understand.

      So here are some points to consider:

      * Why should EMC support their kit behind somebody elses?

      * Why would they want that? EMC's Celerra is every bit up to scratch.

      * NetApp have not provided sufficient information or hardware for EMC to qualify it under their e-lab

      * Quick check of NetApp Now has not revealed any support for a Filler behind an EMC V-Plex, HDS USP-V or VSP, don't think there ever will be.

      So please get some perspective.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cannot Walk, Chew Gum at Same Time

    Tisk, tisk EMC ... who cares if "records are broken" -- fix the broken software!

    Tell me again why I get 20% less performance with RAID-6 compared to RAID-5; And why is deduplication *not* supported on iSCSI and with VMware over NFS?? Oh, and how come I can't take snapshots or clones without bogging-down the array's performance?

    So frustrating!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Troll

      Again, more FUD!

      Wow... is NetApp posting anonymously today?

      Fix the broken software? Um... OnTap 8 or 7 Mode? OSSV not working outside of GMT +8 / -8? SnapVault issues? SnapLock Issues? SnapManager for each application (Verses 1 Replication Manager for everything)

      How about an averare of 15% loss in real read performace with a NetApp vs. EMC (Excluding PAM/FlashCache). RAID-DP is not RAID 6.

      Or howabout the fact that PAM/FlashCache is READ ONLY?

      EMC FASTCache is R/W!

      How about "flash is pointless.... oh we've got flash now, it's good" or "Object Storage sux... we bought bytecast, now it's good" or "Not Compresss.... no....wait, we've got it now..."

      SnapShot's???? Why, oh why do my snapshots occur in my expensive production disks? Oh thats write, snapshots can only occur in the same volume... not like EMC where I can snap shot to much, much less expensive disk.

      Now for a bit of a reality check: http://oraclestorageguy.typepad.com/oraclestorageguy/2007/07/oracle-backup-w.html

      It's good, I've checked.

      Don't be an arse.... if you work for NetApp, say so... I don't work for EMC, but am certified in NetApp, EMC and HDS so I get really annoyed with the crap you guys pull.

      So here are the FUD Rules (again):

      1. You either don't know what you're talking about (Never touched an EMC Array); or

      2. You're lying through your teeth. (You work for a competitor)

      Either way, knock it off.

      1. Paul Hargreaves
        Stop

        I work at NetApp

        I'm not the AC. I do work at NetApp.

        > Um... OnTap 8 or 7 Mode

        Is it broken? If so, how? (BTW, as a certified NetApp individual, you'll know that ONTAP 8 comes in 2 versions, cluster-mode and 7-mode. It isn't "ONTAP 8 or 7-mode", its "ONTAP 8 7-mode or ONTAP 8 cluster-mode").

        > OSSV not working outside of GMT +8 / -8?

        Seriously? Please point me at the burt / NOW page that says this... since we have an entire APAC business that would struggle to use it...

        > RAID-DP is not RAID 6.

        According to whom? SNIA, the industry association created by the vendors to represent all of us non-politically, says it is: http://www.snia.org/education/dictionary/r/ (RAID-DP is diagonal)

        > averare of 15% loss in real read performace with a NetApp vs. EMC

        What? Evidenced how, under what workloads? With what configurations?

        > Or howabout the fact that PAM/FlashCache is READ ONLY?

        Is this a problem? Why is this bad? [hint, for a NetApp array with WAFL and NVRAM, it's the right way. For other vendors, not so much]

        > EMC FASTCache is R/W!

        Great. What does this mean? Why is this good? An answer that includes evidence such as published, audited benchmarks would be even better...

        > How about "flash is pointless.... oh we've got flash now, it's good" or "Object Storage sux... we bought bytecast, now it's good" or "Not Compresss.... no....wait, we've got it now..

        Unified Storage? NAS?

        We've been selling Flash for a long time - PAMII / Flash Cache is flash... (hence the name...)

        Object Storage is one of those "could be a gigantic market in the future so invest now" but enterprise apps such as Exchange, Oracle etc don't support it, so for most customers it is just an interesting discussion point.

        As for compression time-to-market (and sales strategy)- we aren't perfect, and it's just icing on the storage efficiency cake.

        > SnapShot's???? Why, oh why do my snapshots occur in my expensive production disks?

        For performance and efficiency. That is why Snapshots do not hurt performance, unlike some of our competitors arrays. It's also why dedupe works exceedingly well since we can use the blocks that are also in the snapshots.

        > Oh thats write, snapshots can only occur in the same volume... not like EMC where I can snap shot to much, much less expensive disk.

        Expensive is a relative term since dedicating entire drives to your snap space, having to have spares of those drive types, hoping that you got the ratio of "production" vs. "snapshot" disks correct, and the performance drop for using them, is probably not worth the effort. Then restore (the reason for them in the first place); if you have to restore an entire multi-tb database from a snapshot it is much quicker if you don't have to move data around to do it...

        > Now for a bit of a reality check:

        Can we have something more modern than 2007; if this is really a reality check then I assume there will be tons of data to support all of your assumptions.

        > So here are the FUD Rules (again):

        FUD Rules? I thought the first rule of FUD Rules is not to talk about FUD Rules?

  4. Ben Goodyear

    Time machine?

    "...Celerra NX4 and NX3e block and file-access array which has date movers..."

    Some kind of flux capacitor presumably?

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