ESG Solution Showcase VMAX3: Adaptable Enterprise Resiliency Date: August 2015 Author: Scott Sinclair, Analyst Abstract: As enterprises respond to the ever- present reality of rapid data growth, IT organizations face a paradox. The desire to control budgets leads organizations to seek greater infrastructure flexibility, potentially to leverage emerging specialized storage technologies such as all flash arrays or cloud storage. At the same time, however, the necessity of protecting business critical data assets has not vanished. Enterprises continue to demand enterprise- class resiliency. EMC s latest VMAX3 provides an answer. The VMAX3 delivers the platform s tradition of trusted enterprise class resiliency, but has evolved the architecture to provide a level of workload awareness and hardware flexibility uncommon to enterprise storage arrays. Introduction Over the past decade and a half, the information technology industry has experienced an onslaught of data growth. For those in the industry, managing data growth is not a new phenomenon; it is a way of life. In response, a number of new innovations have emerged over that time to help in this ever- present struggle to manage the growth of data. Recently, a number of these new innovations have taken the form of specialized storage architectures optimized for a certain type of workload. The all- flash array is an example, optimized for low latency, high performance workloads, as opposed to high capacity archive workloads. These innovations are based on a core understanding that all data is not created equal, and should not be treated as such. What performance is necessary for the capacity? How low are the latency requirements? How critical is the data and how must it be protected? In an effort to better optimize the storage ecosystem, organizations are starting to investigate and adopt these specialized storage architectures, but face a dilemma. Meeting the variety of demands of multiple workloads requires multiple specialized storage deployments. And multiple deployments can create storage silos, in some cases negating the optimization and efficiency the specialized systems were designed to address in the first place. Additionally, truly enterprise mission- critical workloads come with a requirement that they can never fail. These solutions have historically been tied to monolithic storage architectures that provide massive performance and resiliency, but at the same time often lack flexibility. Ideally, storage infrastructure could be tailored to match each organization s unique data workload characteristics, with specialized storage architectures, such as all- flash arrays and cloud storage solutions, offering new options for performance and cost. Greater choice, theoretically, provides the opportunity to better align workloads in order to better utilize the infrastructure and ultimately save costs. Unfortunately, designing and implementing a tailored storage infrastructure is not as easy as it sounds, with each new storage element adding its own management layer and unique level of data protection. For enterprise organizations that demand the resiliency and indestructability of a storage monolith, but also seek to integrate new specialized storage architectures to better align their infrastructure to their workload needs, EMC, the storage market leader, has recently released the VMAX3. The enterprise storage system continues its long tradition of high resiliency with greater than six nines reliability, but, unlike the storage monoliths of the past, the VMAX3 adds an enhanced This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by EMC and is distributed under license from ESG.
Solution Showcase: VMAX3: Adaptable Enterprise Resiliency 2 level of flexibility and adaptability with a workload- aware architecture that can extend data services and management to other, more specialized storage architectures, such as XtremeIO. VMAX3, additionally, combines these two seemingly conflicting concepts, enterprise resiliency and flexible adaptability, with a workload- and service- level- focused simple management interface. The net result is a new and expanded idea of what an enterprise storage system can be. In other words, VMAX3 has merged the adaptability and workload focus often attributed to software- defined storage architectures with the extreme data resiliency that has been a trademark of the VMAX brand. Analysis In 2015, ESG surveyed 373 IT decision makers responsible for their organizations data storage infrastructures as part of a research study investigating general storage trends. This research study investigated multiple aspects of the current state of the storage industry. In response to a question asking about their top current storage challenges, IT decision makers identified that the rapid growth of data and the associated infrastructure challenges continue to be top pain points for their organizations. While technically second on this list of biggest storage challenges, the rapid rate of data growth was actually tied for the most popular response when IT decision makers were asked to label their primary storage challenge (see Figure 1). If you look at the rest of the top ten, however, it is not difficult to see a trend. Hardware costs, data protection, staffing, and data migration are all impacted and exacerbated by the rapid rate of data growth. 1 Essentially every response on the list can be considered to be a manifestation of the impact data growth has on the data center. FIGURE 1. Biggest Storage Challenges In general, what would you say are your organizacon s biggest challenges in terms of its storage environment? Which would you characterize as the primary storage challenge for your organizacon? (Percent of respondents, N=373, top ten shown) Hardware costs Rapid data growth rate Data protecnon (e.g. backup/recovery, etc.) Staff costs Data migranon Management, opnmizanon and automanon of data placement Running out of physical space Need to support growing virtual server environments Power and cooling costs Device management 4% 4% 5% 5% 7% 8% 8% 18% 18% 23% 23% 27% 2 2 Primary storage challenge All storage challenges Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2015 1 Source: ESG Research Study, 2015 General Storage Trends Survey, conducted in May 2015. All ESG research references and charts in this solution showcase have been taken from this study.
Solution Showcase: VMAX3: Adaptable Enterprise Resiliency 3 From the responses to a separate question, ESG was able to gain insight into how organizations look to respond to these challenges. When asked which IT initiatives over the next 12 months look to impact storage spending, the top two most- cited responses were the use of cloud storage services as a way to source storage capacity (37%), and data center consolidation (25%). These two seemingly opposing initiatives provide some insight into how organizations are looking to manage the challenge of data growth: IT organizations seek to leverage new tiers of storage or specialized storage architectures to gain an advantage in capital expenditures At the same time, firms look to consolidate disparate data centers and storage silos to provide savings from an operational standpoint, and possibly in terms of capital expenses, as well. In other words, organizations desire to take advantage of new storage technologies but acknowledge that centralized management and control is often preferable to distributed infrastructure silos. EMC has not only augmented VMAX3 to be a flexible and adaptable architecture to help solve both of these seemingly conflicting goals, it has also integrated a virtualization tiering layer that can extend data services to external specialized storage resources, such as all- flash storage or cloud gateways. The net result is that an organization s data is no longer sequestered and isolated to a single tier or even a single system. Data can be distributed to the right infrastructure or IT environment. While this distribution occurs, the management and data protection stay central to VMAX3, providing the benefits of a specialized infrastructure with the common command and control of a central and consolidated data center. VMAX3: Latest Evolution in a Storage System with a Long Tradition Implicit in the idea that all data is not created equal is the idea that a business does not value all data equally. The fundamental design and goal of VMAX through its history has been to store the most valuable and most critical data for a business. VMAX s architecture is based on a 25- year history that has seen greater than 1.5 billion run hours with the last three platforms alone. EMC claims the new VMAX3 is no exception and provides greater than six nines resiliency. While much of the messaging around technology tends to gravitate toward the new, it is important to acknowledge history, especially in the enterprise storage space. No programmer and no lab environment can truly simulate or anticipate every potential data threat or every potential failure seen in a real- world data center. As such, for enterprise solutions, history and experience are key. In many cases, organizations are all too happy to delay the latest features to ensure that the most critical data is always protected and always online. VMAX3, however, endeavors to ensure that organizations are not forced to compromise. The added flexibility and adaptability are a result of a number of new capabilities, including: Dynamic Virtual Matrix: VMAX3 offers not only a massive amount of processing horsepower to meet the demands of high performance, low latency workloads, it also introduces the ability to automatically and dynamically allocate processing cores inside its controllers to meet on- demand shifts in performance requirements. IT administrators simply specify the desired performance level and VMAX automatically shifts storage processing from one workload to another. While adjusting performance to workload demands provides a number of advantages, VMAX also provides the ability to deploy processing cores across front- end and back- end tasks as well as for greater granularity of control. For example, front- end processing in the VMAX3 powers the storage input and output operations (I/O) from the host. If a workload typically involves heavy amounts of small I/O from the hosts with a high likelihood of cache hits, then the workload would benefit from more processing being dedicated to serving front- end VMAX services. If a workload involves write- heavy workloads where the drives are involved, however, the workloads would likely benefit more from additional processing being applied to the back- end. This added level of customizability allows for organizations to more closely align the storage
Solution Showcase: VMAX3: Adaptable Enterprise Resiliency 4 infrastructure with the specific needs of their workloads, creating a more efficient and better performing storage environment. HYPERMAX: Building on the concept of agility and flexibility, VMAX3 introduces another capability, a built- in storage hypervisor with the HYPERMAX OS. This embedded storage hypervisor builds on the history of Enginuity, VMAX software architecture. It allows for management, tiering, and file services to be embedded with the VMAX3 system, enabling those services to achieve the resiliency of VMAX infrastructure and to help to ultimately reduce TCO by consolidating capabilities into a single management platform. Currently, EMC has embedded NAS, FAST tiering, and management capabilities; however, according to EMC, the architecture is designed to augment VMAX3 with additional functionality in the future. Adding the potential for future value, EMC has announced its plan to open up this capability to the industry and offered speculation that suggests initial solutions could be targeted at big data analytics. Service level objective- based manageability: With multiple drive types, capacity points, and protection levels, provisioning storage can become increasingly complex. VMAX3 greatly simplifies this process by automating storage provisioning and management to multiple defined service levels (Diamond, Gold, Bronze) focused on response time objectives. When deploying storage for an application, the process of how the selection of storage resources translates into a specific performance level for an application often amounts to guesswork, even when leveraging industry or vendor best practices. VMAX3 s new management paradigm allows an organization to simply select the Diamond service level and the system will automatically allocate resources to provide sub- millisecond response time. If the application doesn t need that level of performance, the solution can supply Gold at five millisecond response time, or alternatives with Silver and Bronze. For an added layer of application- aware performance, VMAX3 also provides application hinting for FAST tiering for database applications. This capability allows the VMAX to better predict which data will be requested by the application, allowing the system to better respond to I/O requests, improving performance. FAST.X extended data services with XtremIO: As mentioned previously, in addition to consolidation, organizations are looking toward specialized storage architectures such as all- flash arrays and the cloud for greater alignment between the underlying storage infrastructure and their specific workload demands. VMAX3 with its FAST.X capability can extend VMAX s enterprise- level data services, such as SDRF (remote replication), SnapVX (local replication), ProtectPoint (direct to back- up integration), and storage tiering to extend to other EMC or third- party platforms, such as XtremIO, Data Domain, and CloudArray. VMAX3 s enas can also be extended to XtremIO, delivering file services to an all- flash array with embedded data reduction. This capability is further integrated with VMAX s service level object provisioning to extend simple storage provisioning and management outside the VMAX. The past several years have seen a strong increase in the types of storage architectures and solutions available, along with the desires to integrate these new architectures. Some in the industry have placed emphasis on software- only architectures for abstracting and optimizing storage infrastructure and aligning that infrastructure to workloads, claiming that software- only storage management environments provide the potential for greater capital savings than a hardware- and software- integrated solution like the VMAX3. While software- only storage management and abstraction layers provide value, there is incremental value in hardware integration as well. As mentioned previously, enterprise storage is first and foremost about providing high degrees of resiliency. Solutions like VMAX3 with FAST.X integrated have pre- validated much of the hardware integration, reducing the risks that might arise due to the nuances of the underlying hardware. Mission- critical enterprise environments rely on trusted and validated storage environments, which is exactly what VMAX3 is designed to deliver.
The Bigger Truth Solution Showcase: VMAX3: Adaptable Enterprise Resiliency 5 With the ever- present challenge of managing an ever- increasing pool of data, organizations look to keep costs in check by balancing two seemingly conflicting goals. The first of these goals is how to leverage multiple storage technology architectures and solutions to optimize the overall storage infrastructure for the unique demands of each application workload. The second goal is how to achieve this efficiency while consolidating management, control, and data protection services to keep management costs in check. Ultimately, storage decisions are business decisions. Storage deployments have to do what is right for the business and the bottom line. In the 2015 General Storage Trends Research Study mentioned earlier, the top storage must have feature was identified as high availability. In enterprise organizations, access to data comes first. The mission- critical business data assets have to be available. VMAX3 is the next iteration in a long history of VMAX storage solutions that tout enterprise- level resiliency for mission- critical applications. With VMAX3, EMC goes further by seeking to solve the challenge of providing an adaptable and flexible infrastructure that offers centralized control, while ensuring data is always available. As a result, VMAX3 claims a storage solution that is almost paradoxical in nature: a tailored application- centric storage architecture with the power to leverage multiple specialized external hardware elements and manage all of the elements within the same span of control, and of course, with VMAX- level enterprise resiliency. It is bold ambition, but that is not unusual given VMAX s history. All trademark names are property of their respective companies. Information contained in this publication has been obtained by sources The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) considers to be reliable but is not warranted by ESG. This publication may contain opinions of ESG, which are subject to change from time to time. This publication is copyrighted by The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc. Any reproduction or redistribution of this publication, in whole or in part, whether in hard- copy format, electronically, or otherwise to persons not authorized to receive it, without the express consent of The Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., is in violation of U.S. copyright law and will be subject to an action for civil damages and, if applicable, criminal prosecution. Should you have any questions, please contact ESG Client Relations at 508.482.0188.