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.
[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.
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