This session gives an overview of the EMC Symmetrix VMAC enterprise storage array. We will discuss the appropriate time to start looking at enterprise storage in your datacenter, the benefits and difference in technology between VMAC and other storage arrays, and give specific examples of how VMAX has helped out customers in their environments

1. An Introduction to Enterprise Storage
Varrow Madness 2012
Brian Boyd – Sr. Enterprise Engineer, Varrow
Mike Parker – ESD BMT Lead, EMC
EMC Symmetrix VMAX

2. 2© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
What are we trying to solve?
Tomorrow’s Storage
Fully Automated Storage Tiering
20% Less Energy
67% Less Foot Print
Lower Price AND
Greater Performance
Today’s Storage
10X More
Capacity in
5 Years
2X More Energy
67% More Foot Print
3X More Money
Marginal Performance

3. 3© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Some Base EMC Engineering Numbers
• Overall EMC R&D Spend (annual): About $2
billion
• ESD Engineering Headcount: 1600
• ESD Headcount dedicated to hardware: About 100
• ESD Engineering Center: Hopkinton, MA
• ESD Manufacturing: Franklin, MA and
Cork, Ireland
• ESD Call Center: Draper, Utah

4. 4© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Basic EMC DMX/V-Max Design Assumptions
• Large SMP-like compute engine (Major Competitive
Difference)
• Event-Driven OS (Appears to be Unique)
• Mature API Calls (Much Better Than Competitors)
• Extensive Software Integration (Used by 150 Companies)
• Event-Intensive Software Environment (SRDF, TimeFinder)
• Hardware Assumptions
– High Availability
– Coherent Memory
– Non-Blocking

5. 5© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Overall Design Evolution
Flash – 10%
FC – 40%
SATA – 50%
Flash – 10%
SATA – 90%
Traditional FAST 4/09 FAST VP

6. 6© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Before
2 Symmetrix DMX Arrays: 113 TB
• 110 x 73 GB Fibre Channel RAID 5
(3+1)
• 520 x 146 GB 10K Fibre Channel RAID
5 (3+1)
• 102 x 300 GB 10 Fibre Channel RAID 5
(3+1)
After
2 Symmetrix VMAX with 2 Engines: 147
TB
• 33 x 200 GB Flash RAID 5 (3+1)
• 276 x 300 GB 10k Fibre Channel RAID 5
(7+1)
• 60 x 1 TB SATA RAID 6 (6+2)
Symmetrix VMAX Advantages
Automated efficiency
Reduced TCO
Faster storage provisioning
Increased I/O bandwidth
Decreased response time
IT Realized Gains
14.55 less kVA
47,800 less BTU/hour
3 fewer data center racks
50% fewer power drops
30% more storage
KPIs
732 drives 369 drives
50%
Fewer
drives
30%
More
capacity
50%
Less
floor
52%
Less
power
52%
Less
cooling
Benefits of FAST VP and Symmetrix
VMAX
Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, and VMware Environment

7. 7© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Critical Technology:
Flash Drives

8. 8© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
The Anatomy of an Enterprise
Flash DriveArchitected for Availability, Reliability, Data Integrity and Performance
End-to-End Multi-bit Error Correction
The Only Enterprise-Class
Flash Drive Available in the Market Today
Dual-Ported
FC Interface
Controller
Logic
DDR
SDRAM
w/SPS
Multiple
Parallel
I/O Channels
Non-Volatile
SLC
NAND Flash
Firmware
• Interface Protocol
• Media Management
• Error Detection & Correction

9. 9© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Enterprise Flash Drive Reliability
• Device-level Reliability
– Dual-ported Fibre Channel interface
– Integrated DRAM power destage protection
– Multi-bit ECC protection overlaps internal
domains
– Modified/extended SMART status
– >1.5 million hour MTBPR (rated)
• NAND Reliability
– SLC NAND rated for 100,000 rewrites with 1-bit
ECC
• Multi-bit ECC extends protection
• Observed life time exceeds 300,0002,000,000
rewrites
– Dynamic Bad-block remapping
• Just like a disk drive
– SDRAM cache buffer minimizes write
amplification
• Symmetrix DMX-4 I/O is aligned to device’s block
size
• Wear-Leveling
– Overloaded raw NAND Capacity
• 200 GB usable = 328 GB raw
• 400 GB usable = 528 GB raw
– Static and Dynamic Wear leveling
• Writes and rewrites are always relocated to new
physical NAND blocks
• Rarely modified blocks are moved to spare pool
• Heavily worn blocks “retired” to contain rarely-
modified blocks
Life Expectancy Should Easily Exceed that of Hard Disk Drives

10. 10© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
Hard Drive Status
• Flooding in Thailand has impacted some
component availability
• Floods affect both primary hard drive suppliers
(Seagate and Hitachi, Ltd)
• Some Increase in hard drive pricing
• Some form factors more affected than others
• Supply for EMC still looks good
• Look for shortage to ease this year

11. 11© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
EMC Symmetrix V-Max
Series with Enginuity
• Revolutionary Evolution of the
World’s Most Trusted Storage
Platform

12. 12© Copyright 2012 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
New Virtual Matrix Architecture Revolutionizes
High-End Storage Capabilities
A high-availability Symmetrix
director pair provides the base
configuration
Virtual
Matrix
Additional Symmetrix director
pairs can be added to scale-
out system resources
Virtual Matrix architecture
enables
CPU, memory, disks, and host
ports to be shared across all
directors

13. • Highly rated Partner Status with
EMC, Cisco, VMware and Citrix.
• Several Healthcare VMAX implementations in the
Carolinas.
• Proven Experience with EPIC Healthcare and
other high end database applications.
• Enterprise experience and certifications.
Why Varrow?

14. • Sales and Pre-Sales – Initial configuration for customer. Provides specifications
to meet project goals, objectives and to meet customer’s budget.
• Solutions Architect – Post Sales design configuration. Must more detail about
the entire environment and how it lays out.
• Project Management – Point on project to manage all Varrow resource needs
and provides and escalation point.
• Sr. Enterprise Engineer – Customer facing, lead on project. Works directly with
customers, offers design advice, suggestions during implementation phase.
• Enterprise Engineer – Assists Sr. Engineer on specific needs of the project,
aides in migrations and initial setup.
The Varrow Process

15. Example Datacenter Today
 Fiber Channel
Disk
 35TB
 AIX Systems
 SATA Disk
 70TB
 File Shares and
Image Storage
 Old Storage
Array
 Fiber Channel
Disk
 10TB
 Old EMAIL
System
Do you have Decentralized Architecture?
 Several arrays, unique configurations and
purposes?
 No service levels defined?
 Difficult to provision?
 Backups Fragmented?
Is your growth driving purchases and
consolidation?
 NAS/SATA archive requirements demand
capacity.
 New requirements such as MS Exchange
or Epic Healthcare.
 Explosive VMware demand.
 Storage growth overrunning departmental
IT?
Do you feel like
this guy running
around your
datacenter?

16. Solution Considerations

17. Tiered approach to Applications
Platinum
Gold
Silver
RPO – No downtime during operating hours, off hours patching. Day to day
operations, File sharing, and 9-5pm business applications. Scheduled outages are
better than unscheduled!
RPO – Close to zero downtime. Often replicated with secondary site failover.
Patient databases, Enterprise Business transactions. PAYROLL
RPO – Nice to have right away, but not a problem for 12-24 hours. Typically archival
type applications.

18. How VMAX Fits
Platinum – Tier 0
Gold – Tier 1
Silver – Tier 2
FC Raid 5 - Very good for Vmware and day to day applications. Business needs
that need to be up 24/7 but typically can take a scheduled downtime around
updates and maintenance items. MS Exchange, Departmental Shares (Via VNX
Gateway device).
High transaction EFD Drives, Fiber Channel, customization per application.
SRDF replication. Recoverpoint (Splitter built into VMAXe and FC splitter for
VMAX) As close to 0% downtime as possible. Epic Healthcare
SATA Raid 5 or 6 – Archival, imaging, videos and things that are important to
your organization but not needing of a response rate as low as T0 or T1
applications.

19. • What if I don’t know which tier to put my applications in?
– FAST VP
– Virtual Provisioning
• What if I need specific I/O requirements for my application?
– FAST VP for general applications
– Custom VMAX disk layout for your specific application that needs it.
• What if I need NFS and CIFS?
– VNX VG8 or VG2 Gateway
– FC attached to VMAX
– Data can be tiered and consolidated within the VMAX
VMAX in your Environment

20. VMAX
Consolidation Example with VMAX and VNX VG8
Gateway
LAN

21. • Many VMAX customers still use VNX, Isilon and other purpose
built storage arrays along side VMAX or as Disaster Recovery
Options.
• VMAX is an option for consolidation when you are ready. It can
scale to large amounts of systems and applications.
VMware, Oracle, EPIC…the list goes on and on!
• Applications can be completely separated from each other or live
heterogeneously with each other on the same array. Flexibility
and customization is key.
Staged and Flexible Approach

22. • 4 month residency and consolidation project off of older CX3, Celerra, and
stand alone servers to VMAX, and VNX VG8 (File). Included Epic production
environment, and Large Scale Cisco UCS / VMware environment. Involved in
day to day activities, migrations and strategy. Also involved Recoverpoint
replication to offsite location. Provided knowledge transfer to staff. Migrations
involved IBM AIX, Windows Server, Vmware and Linux hardware with minimal
downtime using built in technologies such as Open Replicator.
• Design and implementation of a VMAX to replace to consolidate aging HP EVA
and Netapp hardware. Involved in migrations, design consideration and
testing. Provided knowledge transfer to staff. Migrations involved
HPUX, Windows Server, Vmware and Linux hardware.
We are not successful until you are successful!
Example Implementations

23. • FAST VP – Customer A. purchased EFD drives to offload heavy activity data and
SATA drives to offload lesser used data. They did not want to think about
policies, etc and let FAST VP do things automatically. In less than one week of
turning on FAST VP, response times for reads were cut in half and response
times for writes were reduced close to 30%.
• FAST VP – Customer B purchased EFD drives to also offload heavy used data,
but wanted to have a more fine granularity and control over what was moved
to each of his teirs. He set up separate FAST VP policies based on the
applications running on the VMAX. Has seen great successes in response
times for applications.
• Thin Pools – both customers have seen a reduction in how much space is
actually written to disk and what is allocated. For example, Customer A’s
Vmware environment on HP EVA was reduced from approx 25TB to about 16TB
after storage Vmotions to VMAX.
Example Successes

24. Examples of FAST VP – Before (Customer B)
VMware Workload

25. Example of FAST VP – After (Customer B)
VMware Workload

26. MS Exchange and FAST VP
 Customer A’s FAST VP policy was added around March 3rd 2012.
 Backup times for Exchange went from 19 hours down to around 10 hours.
 The FAST VP policy for Exchange was for a 2 TB file system.
This is a
BAM!! like
Emril
Momemt

27. MS Exchange and FAST VP
 Customer A’s I/Os per second increased after FAST VP policy was applied.
 From 1,500 to 3,000 IOPS
My Email is
Faster?!?

28. • VMAX is an excellent enterprise solution for
consolidation of storage.
• VMAX can be purpose built to satisfy the
requirements of critical databases and also be
customized for heterogeneous environments.
• Varrow services for VMAX have been proven to
be successful for our customers.
Summary

29. • Let’s talk for a few minutes!
• My email is bboyd at varrow.com
• Twitter: @sangeek
Questions?