What You Need to Know From EMC World 2016: Day 3

The overarching theme of EMC World 2016 has been modernize. Day 1 was all about modernizing the industry, while day 2 focused on modernizing your data center. The theme of Day 3? emc world pic 11
Modernize your business. In addition to the product announcements and insights, the day featured an address from producer John Landeau (Avatar and Titanic) on how technology is impacting movies and a James Bond-tinged keynote on emerging technologies featuring Jeremy Burton, EMC’s President of Products & Marketing.

Here’s a recap of some of the other festivities and announcements you may have missed from Day 3 of EMC World 2016:

Unity: Data Protection Options

EMC Unity has been one of the stars of this year’s EMC World. The mid-tier storage offering was unveiled during Day 1 and its capabilities were explored even further during Day 2. In store for Day 3 was a look at the security components native to Unity – and what can be added to further harden it against cyber crooks. Topics included Unity’s ability to:

  • pull block, file and Vvols from the same pool
  • replicate virtual appliances to hardware solutions
  • execute controller-based encryption at no additional cost, enabled at install time
    • Encrypt/Decrypt are handled at the SAS controller level, supported on all ports and SLICs
    • Deleting pools deletes all drive encryption keys, may eliminate the need to shred drives
    • Keeps detailed, easily retrievable audit logs
  • provide point in time copies via snapshots
    • The ability to redirect on write technology results with minimal to non-existent impact on performance
    • Multiple sources of snapshots, including:
      • LUN
      • VMware datastore
      • Other snapshots
    • Instant restore from snapshot, automatic snapshot, or existing source provide “undo” capability
    • Snapshots can be customized for frequency and retention time via a scheduler build into the GUI interface.
  • back up filesystem data via NDMP
  • support VPLEX, Recover Point and Data Domain

Unity Multi-Dimensional Flash Flexibility

The flexibility provided by EMC’s Unity was also a hot topic of conversation during Day 3. This included discussions around use cases for Unity’s hybrid deployments, as well as its all-flash arrangement. Beyond that, attendees were walked through a methodology they could use to determine what the makeup of their storage pools should be. Highlights included:

  • Unity’s range from 101-295K IOPS depending on model starting from 300F to 600F
  • Its diverse drive support, covering:
    • Fast Cache, 200, 400 or 800GB
    • SSD for Fast VP
    • SSD for flash only
    • 15K spinning
    • 10K spinning
  • When test run on 500F model, Unity delivered:
    • 1 through 32 threads per LUN, up to 4 LUNs
    • 80/20 read/write ratio at 8K IOPS
    • During 67/33 w/r mix, Unity hit 25K IOPS per drive
  • Sizer tool can be fed existing performance data from EMC array to get detailed configuration recommendations for Unity
  • Vdbench test uses (4) servers attached at 16GBs to Unity 500f servers capable of 200K iops per server
    • 16 LUNs in Raid 5
    • 8KB random 50% read, 48K iops per drive 97K IOPS at 1.33ms response time (5) 800gb SSD drives
    • Same workload against 20 SSDs results in 9700 IOPS per drive with sub 1MS latency
  • Fast Cache now supports online expansion or shrink, a transition which used to be a disruptive event on all previous EMC arrays

The Future of EMC: Emerging Technologies

During Day 3’s general session, which featured the previously-mentioned James Bond flair, CJ Desai and Josh Bernstein (President and Vice President of EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division, respectively) discussed the latest offerings coming out of their division. These included:

  • Software-Defined Storage and Open-Source Technologies – There are three main drivers behind software-defined storage (SDS). The first is economics. As SDS can operate independent of hardware specific features, it can result in tremendous cost-savings. Then there’s scalability. Today’s apps are built with scalability top of mind, and SDS can meet the demands of those apps while also reducing management complexity. Lastly, flexibility is a key. In response to this, EMC has developed a comprehensive collection of SDS options for customers, e.g.:
    • ScaleIO for block storage
      • Software-defined SAN offering
      • Capable of scaling up to 1000 nodes
      • Mainly used to build IaaS tools for traditional, block-based apps
    • Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) for object storage
      • Hyper-scale object storage platform
      • Functions as storage for geo-distributed cloud-based apps
    • IsilonSD Edge for file storage
      • Software-defined version of Isilon file platform
      • Seamlessly syncs data from edge to core
      • Features 36 TB scalability at edge
  • Project Nitro may not be available yet (it’s coming in 2017), but when it arrives, it promises to revolutionize storage. Here’s how:
    • All-flash Isilon, built on blade architecture
    • Capable of scaling out to 400+ nodes and 100 PB capacity
    • Offers 1.5 TB/s bandwidth
  • DSSD is a new innovation from EMC available today. This hardware architecture sports:
    • 10M IOPS at micro-second latency
    • PCIe shared storage
    • Real-time analytics capabilities
    • Over 100 GB/S of bandwidth
  • VxRACK has gone cloud native with its latest version. The new VxRACK 1000 with Neutrino nodes gives companies a platform from which to quickly, securely deploy an on-prem cloud environment. VxRACK:
    • Supports OpenStack, VMare Photon Platform, and more
    • Allows provisioning of cloud-native IaaS in less than one hour
    • Scales with ease, ensuring cloud environments remain fast, agile and enjoy a lower cost

Staying in the loop with EMC World 2016

Weren’t able to attend EMC World 2016? Here are our recaps of Day 1 and Day 2 to help catch you up on what you missed. Members of our enterprise infrastructure team have been on the ground in Las Vegas all week, gaining firsthand access to the news and innovations to come out of the week. Have a question for our team? EMC World-related or not, they can always be reached by clicking HERE. Also, they can be reached through our social media accounts: Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Arraya Insights