EMC has enhanced the capabilities of Symmetrix V-Max storage-arrays, with the addition of 8Gb/s connectivity, thin provisioning and automated reclamation capabilities.
According to EMC, the Symmetrix V-Max, a storage system for both mainframe and open systems environment offers customers a 2X increase in available I/O and allows consolidation, to meet the demands of virtualised data centres and mainframe environments.
The company said that the virtual provisioning for Symmetrix V-Max systems has been enhanced to improve utilisation and the new capabilities include zero space reclamation, thick-to-thin and thin-to-thick support for TimeFinder/Clone software, and automated rebalancing of Virtual Provisioning storage pools as additional capacity is added.
The company claims that these enhancements enable IT organisations to reclaim up to 40% of their allocated capacity when converting to virtual provisioning, while leveraging virtual provisioning inherent wide striping.
EMC has also released Symmetrix V-Max system configurations built around two and four engines and software compression for SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility) traffic over both fibre channel and gigabit ethernet connections.
The Symmetrix V-Max offers the ability to erase flash drives automatically prior to a drive replacement to protect the security of data and supports 8Gb Fibre Channel, 8Gb/s FICON, and 8Gb/s SRDF; and support for the mainframe zHPF protocol streamlines the FICON architecture to reduce I/O overhead and improve mainframe performance, the company said.
The company said that the zero space reclamation feature – through EMC Virtual Provisioning software – reclaims unused capacity from virtually provisioned volumes and also recovers contiguous data blocks containing all zeros. With TimeFinder/Clone Software, Symmetrix V-Max enables thick to thin cloning, replicating standard volumes to smaller thinly-provisioned volumes by copying only written tracks.
In addition, EMC is also offering a two engine configuration that scales to 1200 drives and 4-engine configuration scaling to 2400 drives. With fewer engines, the new configurations offer customers lower acquisition cost for bulk data applications. Fully automated storage tiering (FAST) technology for Symmetrix V-Max and CLARiiON networked storage systems, and Celerra unified storage, automates the movement of data within a storage system, EMC added.
