EMC VNXe3200 SAN Released in 2014

EMC’s VNXe 3200 released in Q2 of 2014 brings about a radical new Price Point for an entry level SAN’s.

OK – Why have I crossed through entry level.

The VNXe 3200 starts at less than £10,000 – That’s Entry Level pricing.

The old VNXe was an entry level box – from a price/function perspective.

So whats different about the VNXe3200.

To me; It has almost the key features of the VNX 2 family.

This box could easily run the entire operations of many of our customers, and I don’t mean a small manufacturing firm in Kent, or a Legal firm in Hampshire.

This system would easily scale and drive the IOP requirements of a small NHS Hospital , and could easily meet the needs of some of the Legal firms we work with in the UK Legal Top 100 – to around the Top 40.

That is; The VNXe3200 would easily drive the requirements for:

• a 500-600 person Law Firm
• or a 2000 person NHS Hospital

We’ll come on to those configurations later.

EMC VNXe3200 –  Whats New:

In 2013, EMC rewrote part of the original EMC VNX code base to allow efficient multi-core operation of the the SAN’s ‘code’

A SAN needs to perform dozens of major functions and the VNX was able to make use of a few cores in a CPU architecture, but was not effective at using all cores in a single CPU or a multi CPU design.

IN 2013, the VNX2 (second revision of the EMC VNX introduced Multi- core capability_

Now, EMC could add ‘as many’ Intel CPUS as required to a SAN, and the many differing functions would effectively spread and load balance across the cores in the CPUS’ (eg functions such a IO, RAID Calculations, Tiering, DeDuplication, Bit Error Scanning etc etc)

This level of code has been introduced into the VNXe3200;

In this simple 2U package, you now have:

• 8 cores of CPU power
• 48GB of overall memory
• 25 disks (plus chassis expansion to 150 disks)
• Scale up to 500TB
• And options for SSD’s – especially useful for FAST CACHE
• Unified iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel
• Data DeDuplication and Compression

Plus, the simplicity of use the VNXe family has been known for

EMC VNXe3200 – Real World Scale:

The IOP’s the VNXe3200 generates and total system throughput, puts this unit into the realms of:

• Delivering 400 VMs from a Hyper-V or VMware environment
  • That’s taking into account typical connection that might exist across a typical LUN set
  • And Typical IOPs
  • The real key: This is not a 50 VM SAN or a 100 VM SAN
    • Its in the order of 500 VM’s in a typical Microsoft ‘Office’ style Environment

OR

• How about coping with the boot storm and daily running of 500 VDI desktops
  • Even with power users needing 30 IOP’s per desktop (Lets assume 100 power users)
  • And average users consuming 10 IOP’s
    • The VNXe3200 with SSD’s for Fast Cache and standard disks for higher tiers of storage would easily deliver the IOP’s and Throughput for 500 Desktops

OR

• Using a dedicated VNXe3200 for an Exchange 2010 roll-out, the VNXe would barely be ‘taxed’ from an IOPs’ perspective and would only be a matter of disk sizing/scale t hold the mailbox size, dumpster size and transaction log space for the 2000 Users.
• Lets say in total 10GB per user –
  • Then a VNXe3200 at 20TB would suffice.

In essence, we see the VNXe3200 as the ideal ‘new SAN’ for any business, that can either be scaled to a 500TB and 11,000 IOP system, or just as easily choose mutiple VNXe3200’s for job specific tasks.