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Next Generation PowerMax

The PowerMax family has gained two new members today: the 2500 and the 8500. Our Dell team has been hard at work on this new platform that has many updates. And since we have announced the new systems today, I wanted to share some highlights.

The new platform hardware has several big changes:

• Physical size reduced by 50% for major components
• Cache space for metadata uses Intel Optane persistent memory
• Fabric connectivity from all nodes (formerly directors) to all drives
• Self-encrypting NVMe drives
• Simplified I/O modules (one for FC/FICON, one for Ethernet)

The software running on the new systems has also had major improvements:

• Flexible RAID for data storage
• Compression for CKD data devices
• NVMe/TCP host connection support
• FICON support on the smaller 2500

And many security updates:

• Hardware root of trust security
• Software and firmware digital signatures & security enhancements
• Two-factor authentication for array management
• Data at rest encryption (D@RE) key rotation

Combining these together produces a host of customer benefits, including:

• Up to 4+PBe capacity per node pair
• Always balanced drive/node workload performance
• Single drive upgrades
• Arrays as small as 5 rack units (that also support mainframe)

And of course, the arrays still provide the great core features (64k host devices, LUN data security, support for open systems/IBM iSeries/mainframe, 6 second code loads), snap tools (64m snaps, secure snaps, snap policy automation), remote replication (SRDF/S, A, Metro, SmartDR), and more that PowerMax is known for. Now delivering even more amazing performance: more IOPS, more bandwidth, and at lower latency. We look forward to delivering these new systems to customers to help drive more value to their businesses. Stay tuned for more details around this great new platform.

PowerMax and Malware Protection

PowerMax arrays have great security and data safety features. That does not prevent malware within a server from writing encrypted/garbled data on top of good data. Enhanced processes, procedures, and tools for malware recovery are critical to business operations. PowerMax snapshots can help with rapid recovery after such a malware attack, providing many point-in-time options for business restoration.

PowerMax IDC Lab Validation

The IDC team has done an updated lab validation of the PowerMax platform. You can find the full document here. The report highlights the simplicity, efficiency, and resilience of the PowerMax family of arrays. The slide layout makes it easy to rapidly digest.

FIRST Tech Challenge 2019-2020 season kickoff classes

This post is an overview of the classes I am teaching for the North Georgia FTC kickoff at Kennesaw State University on September 7, 2019. They cover hardware design and programming for FTC robots. (Links are included for class materials and videos of each class.)

PowerMax plans for Storage Class Memory and NVMeoF

In a recent article for The Register, Chris Mellor discussed PowerMax and some of our plans for 2019. In summary, we designed PowerMax specifically because we could see Storage Class Memory (SCM) as the coming media for the most important (and I/O intensive) data. We designed PowerMax to use all NVMe media, so that SCM would be just another type of capacity we could exploit. We designed the encryption so that SCM would be protected just like our other media. The Machine Intelligence classifies workloads, so that the most important data can get the benefit of this new (and expensive) media without any additional effort from customers using PowerMax arrays – it will just work. As we noted at Dell Technologies World last year, we plan to deliver SCM for all PowerMax systems this year. And to complete the NVMe picture, we plan to ship NVMe over Fibre Channel fabrics this year as well, giving us NVMe from the host to cache to the drives, providing customers with even lower latency I/O.

The Other Internet of Things

Industry talk of the Internet of Things is usually focused on how each and every thing in our lives is going to connect to the Internet and share what it knows. And the online shopping metrics show that the Internet has forever changed how we purchase things. But what about how we share them?

The Maker Community

Hobbyists are sort of the physical world hackers. They find ways to do what they need to get done, and in the process they sometimes come up with very innovative solutions. Before the Internet, they might be able to get ideas from magazines like Popular Mechanics or Popular Electronics. Maybe they would start with a Heathkit model of something close to what they wanted. Now many might start with an Arduino and build a prototype of the machine they need. And they share their ideas on the Internet as part of the maker community. The challenge for many that want to participate in the maker world is that while they would like to consume (and maybe slightly modify) things from other makers, they are not ready to design it from the ground up themselves. (The change from Do-It-Yourself to Do-It-With-Others - collaborative innovation.)

3D Printing as Distribution

The folks from MakerBot realized early on that 3D printing had two markets: one for designers of things that wanted a way to build one-off parts, and another for people who wanted to print things that others had designed. To foster the second market, they created Thingiverse, where any user can post the design files for something they have created and let others print their own copies.

VMAX3 Architected for World Record Performance

The flagship EMC VMAX 400K sets a new world record for SPC-2 (bandwidth) performance, delivering more than 30 percent greater performance compared to any other storage array. Achieving a SPC-2 aggregate result of 55,643 SPC-2 MBPS™, an all-flash VMAX 400K leads the pack, beating the nearest competitor, the HP XP7 (the OEM version of the Hitachi G1000 system), by 30%. Not only is the VMAX3 significantly faster, it also provides an attractive price/performance at $33.58 per SPC-2MBPS™.

Architecture Matters

So just how did VMAX3 achieve this record setting SPC-2 performance? Much of its performance and scale is inherent in the impressive VMAX3 architecture. In fact, the original blue print for VMAX3 incorporates several aggressive design-points required to deliver extreme levels of performance. Let’s take a look.

First: Dynamic Virtual Matrix: VMAX3 is designed to handle hyper consolidation and large bandwidth, highly sequential workloads such as data warehousing, decision support, batch processing, and big data analytics. Each VMAX3 director connects to dual, redundant InfiniBand fabrics at 56Gb/s, which provide switched bandwidth for communication among the directors. Within the directors, multi-lane PCIe Gen3 lanes provide full bandwidth to every port on each I/O slot[1]. As average I/O sizes continue to grow, EMC has designed VMAX3 to handle these large bandwidth workloads in addition to the traditional smaller block OLTP workloads.

Second: To use all the bandwidth, VMAX3 has more CPU power and new ways to manage it. Each VMAX3 director has 2 Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, each providing 6, 8, or 12 CPU cores. VMAX3 systems have up to 384 cores, and hyper-threading provides double that in logical cores. The logical cores are managed in pools, with each pool focused on providing host I/O, disk I/O, remote replication, or other functions. The use of pooling ensures that the CPU power needed for any given workload on a specific set of components is always available. Logical cores can be moved between pools dynamically, providing flexibility to deal with shifts in workload profiles.

Third: VMAX3 continues to provide the cache management that powerful Symmetrix systems are known for. Reads served from cache are faster than from any drive, even flash. VMAX3 does intelligent data placement and pre-fetch to maximize cache read hits. The large cache continues to provide mirrored protection for all write data, allowing the data to de-stage to persistent storage media in the background.

Finally: HYPERMAX OS ties the pieces together to support the industry’s richest data services. For example, customers who are looking for systems that can sustain 50+GB/s of data bandwidth usually have databases that are over 150TB in size, since that would allow them to read the entire database in under an hour. But what about backup and recovery of such a database? As a clear example of the new data services, VMAX3 with ProtectPoint can reduce the restore time for such large databases from days to minutes.

The performance optimized architecture makes VMAX3 the ideal solution for hyper consolidation. Customers can consolidate multiple large data workloads to lower TCO, ease management, and improve reliability, all while delivering industry-leading performance.

What will the future bring?

We expect the future will bring additional world records from VMAX3, not only in the form of SPC results, but also in setting the standard for innovative enterprise data services, advanced replication techniques, and in establishing new ways to stretch VMAX3 data services to the cloud. 

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[1] Many other architectures use bandwidth over-subscription, whereas VMAX3 has the bandwidth to the I/O cards to drive all ports at full speed simultaneously.

VMAX3: The New Hardware

On July 8, EMC announced the latest new systems in the VMAX family. The new systems are the 100K, the 200K, and the 400K, known collectively as the VMAX³ Family. They are updated versions of the 10K, 20K, and 40K. In addition to all the software enhancements, the systems have all new hardware and packaging. With the new dual engine system bays, the number of bays lines up directly with the names of the systems: the 100K uses 1 bay, the 200K uses up to 2 bays, and the 400K uses up to 4 bays. This post is focused on the hardware and packaging across these new systems.

The VMAX³ Family systems are packaged with one or two engines per system bay, and all bays are 24” wide (19” internal rails). Each bay also contains DAEs holding the disk drives for the engines. These new denser configurations take up much less floor space. For example, the densest drive bay for a 40K holds 400 x 2.5” drives. A new single engine system bay holds up to 720 x 2.5” drives and one engine. A new dual engine system bay holds 480 x 2.5” drives and two engines.

Thank you, Larry Ellison

During his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Larry Ellison launched the new Exadata X3. The new version appears to have some nice new capabilities, including caching writes to EFD, which are likely to improve the usability of Exadata for OLTP workloads. And he was nice enough to include the EMC Symmetrix VMAX 40K in detail on 30% of his slides as he announced the new Exadata. And for that, I give thanks. I am sure that Salesforce.com were similarly thankful when Larry focused so much of his time on their product in his keynote last year.

For those who have seen the presentation, Larry’s focus with respect to the VMAX was how much faster the new Exadata system was (which you can find starting about 31 minutes into his keynote). And I am sure that message got through. However, the other message that seems to also have been delivered was something he may not have intended: if you have a serious Oracle workload, your only real option other than Exadata is VMAX. He even quotes that “EMC announced the latest and greatest of all the disk arrays.” I am not sure we could ask for much more.

But Larry is Competing with VMAX

Some will note that since all of the references from Larry were to point out how much faster the new Exadata is, EMC should be concerned. So why am I so thankful? First, Larry is well known (as most vendors are) for putting up big numbers. But with Exadata, the level of exaggeration has it’s own reputation in the market. Since it is not possible to run a normal I/O test against an Exadata, the tests all have to be done with an Oracle database. And how the tuning is done for that makes all the difference in the world as to the ability for any customer to ever get the same results. The VMAX numbers, on the other hand, are pretty simple to recreate. Connect up some servers. Have them all do large block sequential reads. Measure the results. After all, that is what EMC does to build the numbers in the first place.

And when replication is turned on, the EMC numbers are primarily limited by the bandwidth of the connections and the latency between the sites. From the feedback from customers at the OOW sessions this week, it sounds like they are seeing a much larger impact to their Exadata performance with Data Guard enabled than they had been led to expect by their Oracle sales teams.

Space Recovery

When migrating data from an old array to a new one, there are many tools to help. EMC VMAX provides a built-in tool called Open Replicator for Symmetrix (ORS), which can push and pull data to and from other arrays. This is a quick review of the benefits one customer has seen using ORS.

Moving Data

ORS makes the VMAX host ports look like a Windows server to other arrays in the SAN (EMC or not). The VMAX needs to be granted zoning access to the original devices on the source array.

Once the VMAX has proper access, the data can be pulled into new devices. The new VMAX devices are usually Virtually Provisioned (thin) devices, as VP devices are much simpler to manage both for capacity and performance reasons.

Recovering Space

As a part of the migration, the VMAX can look for empty areas on the source device. Since VMAX VP volumes allocate space in 768k extents, any aligned 768k of data that is all zeros does not need to be saved on disk, since reads from unallocated space always report zeros. By activating the zero detection with ORS, these extents of all zero data are never written to disk. The use of this relatively small extent size allows for a much finer-grained recovery than some other systems.

Customer Example

I have a customer that has been using ORS for a while to perform migrations. However, they were reluctant to use the zero detection. There was a concern that this was somehow not compatible with all operating systems (it is, always), or that it would otherwise present a risk to their systems. They did some testing in the lab, and became comfortable with the process. Then they tried it in production. Now they can’t get enough of this technology.

Here are their results. For the next 25 servers that they migrated, there was 20.4TB of capacity on the LUNs they were moving. By using the ORS with zero detection, at the end of their move they had 11.7TB of data written on disk – and they had just saved over 8.8TB of capacity that had been all zeros. The graphic here shows the 3 largest systems (each over 2TB of source capacity) and the savings, as well as the overall results. In the end, they averaged over 43% savings by using the zero detection in their data migration.