Tiered storage system

The EMC Virtual Matrix architecture integrates industry-standard components with EMC Symmetrix capabilities to deliver a system that is claimed to provide scalability to hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of IOPS (input/output per second), supporting hundreds of thousands of VMware and other virtual machines in a single federated storage infrastructure.

The system combines the performance and efficiency of a scale-up architecture and the cost-effective flexibility of a scale-out architecture. It incorporates automation to simplify storage management and enables resources to be scaled on demand.

The first storage system based on the architecture is the EMC Symmetrix V-Max tiered storage system, which combines enterprise Flash, fibre channel and SATA drives to allow users to meet the wide range of storage requirements for high performance and high capacity in a single system.

The V-Max engine is a flexible building block that features multiple redundant quad-core Intel Xeon processors with up to 128 GB of memory and up to 16 host and 16 drive channel connections. The architecture enables the system to interconnect and share resources, allowing it to scale to 1024 GB of global memory with twice as many front-end and back-end connections compared to the Symmetrix DMX-4 systems.

The V-Max system is claimed to provide more than three times the performance, twice the connectivity and three times more usable capacity than Symmetrix DMX-4 systems and uses significantly less power per terabyte and per IOP.

The system automates storage provisioning, reducing the time and complexity of provisioning. Both the server and storage resources can be provisioned on demand, with centralised management, reporting and control. In addition, EMC ControlCenter support for both the Symmetrix V-Max storage system and VMware will increase visibility and automate reporting across the virtual server and storage environments.

In tiered storage environments, data can be non-disruptively relocated to different storage tiers and RAID protections based on business requirements.