Is V-Max the next InVista (Hasta La Vista Tigon)?
By: Christophe Bertrand on June 10, 2009
Comments(2 ) | Contact Christophe
Looking at recent threads, there is something I’d like to clarify concerning some less than accurate information regarding our ability to be in compliance with constant replication requirements: our Tiered Storage Manager will only need to be suspended if a customer is using asynchronous replication (typically over very long distances). As a reminder, synchronous replication environments will be supported with TSM V6.2 which is currently in beta. Additionally, let’s not mitigate the fact that while the pairs are suspended, the Universal Storage Platform tracks and capture all updates so they will be propagated upon reestablishing the session (after resync).
I also want to point out in response to Mr. Burke’s blog comment about Flash drives that while EMC moved aggressively to announce support of Flash before other competitors, EMC did so at exorbitant price points. In addition, this was done with an unknown MTBF that could be influenced by the read/write ratio of a given workload. Finally, little was said about the fact these new Flash devices were not the most cost effective solution for workloads that required both high random read I/O performance and high throughput sequential transfer capabilities. In French you call this the “Flou Artistique” – a blurred vision maybe?
In a related conversation, one of my colleagues (we’ll call him Mr M.) was asking me if we remembered Wide Sky and InVista. I suppose no one disputes EMC’s marketing capabilities, but it makes you wonder what this really means in the long run. HDS has now shipped over 12,500 controllers that are capable of storage virtualization, something that the Big Symm V-Max will never do. Hasta La Vista (InVista) is a few hundred at best.
Did I mention that we have many of those 12,500 systems actively virtualizing third party storage like EMC and leveraging dynamic provisioning, replication and migration capabilities? Customers are doing this because they get operational efficiency and flexibility out of their storage infrastructure. You can’t do that with a V-Max.
With all of its roadmap bells and whistles and hybridness, is V-Max Big Symm going to see the same fate as InVista?
Comments (2 )
Michael Hay on 13 Jun 2009 at 10:57 pm
Christophe, thanks for pointing this out also let’s take note contrary to Barry’s points, EMC was not the first to put SSDs into storage devices. SSDs were in use as far back as 1997 or even earlier — talk about pricey then — and were used in applications such as the Space Shuttle due to their tolerance to high vibration environments. I know this because I did research on SSDs way back over a decade ago. Again EMC is not first to market here as in many places, but perhaps through sheer will of bending the press to their message and thoughts people sure think so.
I also don’t think that V-Max is like Invista, well because EMC GA’ed the product unlike Invista. However the fact that the DMX still exists as a separate product does lead me to believe that EMC has doubts about the V-Max overall. I think that they are hedging their bets here.
Virtual Bob on 22 Jun 2009 at 5:18 am
You seem a bit emotional about the new V-Max.
Perhaps your post would be more useful if you would actually write about all the benefits of the V-Max and anything you might have. An objective view might help, not favoring one or the other
Fact about SSDs and EMC is that EMC was the first company to introduce SSDs in enterprise class systems, such as the Symmetrix.