Just like any vendor, EMC is touting its new product - the Symmetrix V-Max and making as much hay about it as possible. But once the dust settles - there are some important questions to ask:
1. V-Max has some new capabilities - but what about all of the investment that customers have made in the DMX? Do DMX customers get any of these features or do they have to buy the V-Max to get them?
2. If they have to buy the V-Max to get the new features - does EMC have a service for doing the data migrations and application switch over? How much does it cost? How long will it take? What impact will there be to operations?
3. What about all of the scripts that have been developed for older Symms? Will they work with the new V-Max? And if yes, will some of new functionality provided by the V-Max by using older Symm scripts be lost?
4. Will the DMX have these new capabilities at some point or is it being obsoleted?
5. If the DMX is being obsoleted - then isn’t the V-Max really a new product - a disruptive “evolution” - requiring customers to spend new dollars and implement new infrastructure to get the new value? In these economic times - that can be pretty challenging for IT budgets.
6. It will be interesting to see how the reality compares to the rhetoric - there is a big difference between concept and execution. What are customers saying about the new capabilities of the V-Max? Not just in comparison to the DMX but to other vendor solutions?
7. This is a big deal to EMC - the Symmetrix seemed stuck for a few years without any real innovation and this announcement breaks that trend. But when will all of the capabilities be available?
8. It is one thing to say that performance is X% faster but that is just a bunch of hyperbole in the real world. Since EMC doesn’t have a published baseline of performance for the DMX - what is the comparison based on?
9. There are a number of performance issues to consider with this new 1.0 architecture. What is the impact of performance when tiering? Has anyone tested the impact of performance with wide stripping - it should be faster but has it been measured? What is the impact on primary I/O performance when remote mirroring is taking place? The impact of primary I/O performance during a RAID rebuild? Since this is a new architecture - what is the performance impact when a controller is unavailable? How does performance scale as more storage and I/O is added? We don’t know the answer to any of these questions.
10. Many of the new capabilities on the V-Max are 1.0 features and more importantly the fundamental architecture is 1.0! Think about that for a second - an entirely new architecture that has no track record of success. It is a 1.0 solution that carries with it the encumbrances of an older solution with millions of lines of code. What are the detailed best practices for customers wanting to switch from DMX to V-Max?
These are important questions that no one seems to be asking or answering. There are probably other questions that need to be raised as well - and I will ponder these - and please weigh in if you think of any.
Comments (6 )
Response to Tony’s V-Max Questions - techmute.com on 14 Apr 2009 at 6:23 pm
[...] paging through Google Reader waiting for my World of Warcraft realm to come online, I came across this post from blogger-for-hire Tony Asaro on his HDS blog. As an “end user” of storage, I [...]
Matt on 14 Apr 2009 at 6:23 pm
An end-user’s response: http://techmute.com/2009/04/15/response-to-tonys-v-max-questions/
Tony Asaro on 14 Apr 2009 at 7:44 pm
If you want to read my reponse to Matt go to the same link he posted.
Matt on 14 Apr 2009 at 8:30 pm
Good points Tony. If you want to re-print either of them here, please feel free to do so. I’ve responded in kind back on my site… I’m still a little unclear on point 1 vs point 4… seems to be slightly different angles on the same thing. Not that it really matters that much =).
Tony Asaro on 15 Apr 2009 at 8:46 am
Will do - it is a good dialog. And I am curious what your plans are for V-Max. And once you install it - please share with us your experiences.
The Green Machine, Asim Zaheer, Hitachi Data Systems » Blog Archive » I’m Max-ed Out on 15 Apr 2009 at 10:07 pm
[...] Tony Asaro points out many of the questions that clearly remain and we will be interested to see if any answers emerge any time soon. I also noticed the V-Max’s claim to consume 20% less power per TB. I sure hope so, especially when you’re stacking that much storage inside a single “virtual” frame. We’ll see about all this, but I for one am Max’ed out from all this hype and patiently await the proof so we can really see whether this new box is revolutionary or simply another attempted extension of the good old days. [...]