Kitty, Kitty…EMC is a TrueCopy Cat (Crouching Tigon)
By: Christophe Bertrand on April 15, 2009
Comments(3 ) | Contact Christophe
It was pretty interesting to hear from EMC this week with their (rushed) announcement of the DMX-5, sorry, Symmetrix-V, where the V stands for Virtual…I think, which really means “virtual virtualization” because it doesn’t do storage virtualization. Wait. I get it, it’s virtual reality! Hu has a great perspective on this.
This new system is supposed to be a hybrid Clariion CX 4 and DMX 4 which is probably why it was code-named Tigon (see Mr. Mellor’s article) which is a hybrid between a Lionness and a Tiger. You will note that the male is typically infertile, which I find hilarious and actually quite appropriate for this technology catch up release. From Wikipedia, “male tigons are sterile while the females are generally fertile. Because only female tigons are fertile, tigons cannot reproduce with each other.”
What about code name “Big Symm”? That would have been better.
But the feline analogy makes even more sense when we look at the SRDF replication piece. Replication is about copying, and that’s what EMC just did by copying HDS’s pass-through configuration. A TrueCopy Cat! We’ve had this for a while, so thanks for the endorsement and welcome to the club (late fees apply).
By the way, while pass-through cascade configurations offer advantages, from a pure DR perspective, the multi-target configuration is better. Just thought I’d let them know.
Comments (3 )
the storage anarchist on 16 Apr 2009 at 1:47 pm
Symmetrix has been doing multi-site, cascaded and multi-hop replication for years- SRDF/EDF is just diskless cascaded, to reduce the cost of long distance async replication without loss of data.
But all this talk about copy-cat replication – you might want to be a little more careful with your mud-slinging. I recall some legal action not that long ago that confirmed the fact that EMC was first with array-based replication technologies- both local and remote. And Hitachi COW was nearly 3 years after TimeFinde/Snaps. And USP-V *STILL* doesn’t offer equivalent of SRDF/Star or /Foursite…
So, who’s copying who when it comes to replication?
And “By the way” (as you say) – since TSM requires customers to stop their replication sessions for the duration of relocating a LUN, said customer is out of Compliance and has to notify the SEC before and after every move. SEC phone calls are never a good thing…fortunately for the Financial Services industry, V-Max Virtual LUN migration doesn’t suffer this limitation.
In fact, V-Max VLUN can concurrently relocate up to 128 times more LUNs than TSM (1024 vs. 8), moving them at least 2.5 times faster than TSM, and with near-zero impact on running application performance during the move whereas TSM can double or even triple response times.
V-Max didn’t COPY USP-V – it simply does similar things BETTER, FASTER and EASIER.
I just thought I’d let you know
Claus Mikkelsen’s Blog » Blog Archive » Smackdown on Barry Burke, EMC on 19 Apr 2009 at 11:15 pm
[...] technology, and Barry Burke, the self-proclaimed storage anarchist, made some comments on our own Christopher Bertrand’s blog that need some serious corrections. I’m not sure where he gets his information, but he should be [...]
Christophe Bertrand » Blog Archive » Big Symm is not the cat’s meoww on 20 Apr 2009 at 9:52 am
[...] you for your comment on my previous post, Barry. It’s a pleasure to see you on these pages. I have to admit I found your post both [...]