EMC has also announced four and 12 port Fibre Channel directors that Hollis said effectively allow customers to put all of the functionality of a SAN inside the covers of a single Symmetrix array. EMC expects this approach to yield a 22% total cost of ownership savings over deploying an external SAN.
EMC Refreshes Symmetrix with Faster CPUs, Fatter Disks
By Timothy Prickett Morgan
DATE: 9/10/2001
EMC Corp will today unveil three new models in its Symmetrix enterprise storage
arrays that will refresh the product line with more capacious disk drive
technology, more powerful and more numerous processors in the Symmetrix
controllers, and improved software and connectivity.
Today's announcements, which are the first major enhancements to the Symmetrix
line since April 2000, include three new Symmetrix models. All of the new
models make use of a 181Gb disk drive that was co-developed by Seagate
Technology. Chuck Hollis, vice president of markets and products at Hopkinton,
Massachusetts- based EMC, said that the new Seagate drive fully exploits the
Symmetrix architecture and has been designed to increase disk capacity and
platter density.
On online transaction processing workloads in particular, applications are
sensitive to the number of disk drives in an array that is feeding servers. Too
few arms can cause severe performance degradation, which is why many companies
are still using 9Gb and 18Gb disk drives in their servers and arrays even
though 36Gb, 72Gb and fatter disks are available on the market.
By keeping with skinny disks, they can keep arm counts high, arm utilization
low, and overall throughput steady. That said, with a sophisticated staged
cache architecture, cache memories can make up for contention and latencies
often associated with dense disk drives. The main reason why companies always
want fatter disks is that the cost per gigabyte is always lower on fatter disks
than on skinny ones.
One of the side effects of using the new Seagate 181Gb disk drive is that EMC
has been able to offer more compact Symmetrix arrays. The new Symmetrix 8320
offers 3.5Tb of capacity, 32Gb of global cache memory, and about 80% of the
aggregate controller processing capacity as the existing 8430 machine, which
supported 4.8Tb of aggregate capacity. The new 8230 supports twice as many more
internal Fibre Channel connections (24) and up to 288 external Fibre Channel
connections, and 512 ESCON or FICON logical paths.
The existing 8430 only supported 32 ESCON paths. In short, the new Symmetrix
8230 offers about the same performance, a lot more connectivity, and fits in a
half-rack instead of a full rack. The Symmetrix 8530, which has 64Gb of global
cache and supports 17.4Tb of disk capacity in a fully loaded configuration,
only takes up one rack compared to the Symmetrix 8730 that it replaces. Because
the new Symmetrix models include PowerPC processors running at 333MHz rather
than the 266MHz speed used in the prior generation of Symmetrix arrays and the
new arrays include a larger number of processors, the aggregate processing
power in the 8530 is 45% greater than in the 8730.
The aggregate processing power in the new top-end Symmetrix 8830 is more than
twice that of the 8730. Both machines are three rack configurations. However,
the 8830 can support up to 69.5Tb of capacity, compared to 19.2Tb in the
Symmetrix 8730, and it can do so in part because it has double the global cache
and 80 processors compared to 48 in the 8730. All of the new Symmetrix models
support 8,000 logical units, compared to 4,096 in the prior generation of
Symmetrix machines.
On the mainframe front, the new arrays from EMC support IBM's FICON fiber links
as well as its Globally Dispersed Parallel Sysplex remote system clustering
extensions to z/OS and OS/390. EMC has also announced four and 12 port Fibre
Channel directors that Hollis said effectively allow customers to put all of
the functionality of a SAN inside the covers of a single Symmetrix array. EMC
expects this approach to yield a 22% total cost of ownership savings over
deploying an external SAN. "Although external SANs do add value, and we deploy
them, many customers didn't think the need for supporting a few more servers
justified the investment in a SAN," says Hollis. That's why EMC has put the SAN
inside the Symmetrix.
As for controller software, EMC has enhanced the Enginuity operating system in
the Symmetrix to include connectivity to a greater number of servers through a
larger number of paths as well as increasing the number of logical volumes and
partitions that are supported on the machines. Enginuity V5568 also has
enhancements that allow the Symmetrix to handle more tasks at once while
providing better isolation between those tasks to keep them from bumping heads.
The reason why this is necessary is that in a consolidated storage environment
such as those supported by EMC's key customers, a storage array has to be able
to be reconfigured, capacity needs to be redeployed, files need to be mirrored
and archived and data requests have to be fielded to servers - all at the same
time. In times past, these jobs were done mostly in isolation. But today, said
Hollis, companies want to do it all simultaneously. Perhaps more significantly,
customers want to support hundreds of server connections, tens of terabytes of
disk capacity and hundreds of distinct applications, whereas in the past they
wanted to support tens of connections, hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and a
single application on a Symmetrix array. Pricing for the new Symmetrix arrays
start at $100,000. timpm@computerwire.com |
