| Called EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 |
| Called EMC Symmetrix V-Max |
| DMX: Direct Matrix Architecture |
| V-Max: Virtual Matrix Architecture |
| Max Capacity: 1 PB Raw Storage |
| Max Capacity: 2 PB of Usable Storage |
| Max Drives: 1900. On RPQ: 2400 max |
| Max Drives: 2400 |
| EFD’s Supported |
| EFD’s Supported |
| Symmetrix Management Console 6.0 |
| Symmetrix Management Console 7.0 |
| Solutions Enabler 6.0 |
| Solutions Enabler 7.0 |
| EFD: 73GB, 146GB, 200GB, 400GB |
| EFD: 200GB, 400GB |
| FC Drives: 73GB, 146GB, 300GB, 400GB, 450GB |
| FC Drives: 73GB, 146GB, 300GB, 400GB |
| SATA II: 500GB, 1000 GB |
| SATA II: 1000 GB |
| FC Drive Speed: 10K or 15K |
| FC Drive Speed: 15K |
| SATA II Drive Speed: 7.2K |
| SATA II Drive Speed: 7.2K |
| Predecessor of DMX-4 is DMX-3 |
| Predecessor of V-Max is DMX-4 |
| DMX-4 management has got a bit easy compared to the previous generation Symmetrix |
| Ease of Use with Management – atleast with SMC 7.0 or so called ECC lite |
| 4 Ports per Director |
| 8 Ports per Director |
| No Engine based concept |
| Engine based concept |
| 24 slots |
| The concept of slots is gone |
| 1 System bay, 9 Storage bays |
| 1 System bay, 10 Storage bays |
| No engines |
| 8 Engines in one System (serial number) |
| 64 Fiber Channel total ports on all directors for host connectivity |
| 128 Fiber Channel total ports on directors/engines for host connectivity |
| 32 FICON ports for host connectivity |
| 64 FICON ports for host connectivity |
| 32 GbE iSCSI ports |
| 64 GbE iSCSCI ports |
| Total Cache: 512GB with 256 GB usable (mirrored) |
| Total Cache: 1024 GB with 512 GB usable (mirrored) |
| Drive interface speed either 2GB or 4GB, drives auto negotiate speed |
| Drive interface speed 4GB |
| Green color drive LED means 2GB loop speed, Blue color drive LED means 4GB loop speed |
| Only 4GB drive speed supported. |
| 512 byte style drive (format) |
| 520-byte style drive (8 bytes used for storing data check info). Remember the clarion drive styles, well the data stored in both the cases is different. The 8 bytes used with the Symmetrix V-Max are the data integrity field based on the algorithm D10-TIF standard proposal |
| FAST: Fully Automated Storage Tiering may not be supported on DMX-4’s (most likely since the support might come based on a microcode level rather than a hardware level) |
| FAST: Fully Automated Storage Tiering will be supported later this year on the V-Max systems |
| Microcode: 5772 / 5773 runs DMX-4’s |
| Microcode: 5874 runs V-Max |
| Released in July 2007 |
| Released in April 2009 |
| Concepts of Directors and Cache on separate physical slots / cards |
| Concept of condensed Director and Cache on board |
| DMX-4 Timefinder performance has been better compared to previous generation |
| 300% better TImefinder Performance compared to DMX-4 |
| No IP Management interface into the Service Processor |
| IP Management interface to the Service Processor, can be managed through the customer’s Network – IP infrastructure |
| Symmetrix Management Console is not charged for until (free) DMX-4 |
| Symmetrix Management Console to be licensed at a cost starting the V-Max systems |
| Architecture of DMX-4 has been similar to the architecture of its predecessor DMX-3 |
| Architecture of V-Max is completely redesigned with this generation and is completely different from the predecessor DMX-4 |
| Microcode 5772 and 5773 has be build on previous generation of microcode 5771 and 5772 respectively |
| Microcode 5874 has been build on base 5773 from previous generation DMX-4 |
| No RVA: Raid Virtual Architecture |
| Implementation of RVA: Raid Virtual Architecture |
| Largest supported volume is 64GB per LUN |
| Large Volume Support: 240GB per LUN (Open Systems) and 223GB per LUN (Mainframe Systems) |
| 128 hypers per Drive (luns per drive) |
| 512 hypers per Drive (luns per drive) |
| Configuration change not as robust as V-Max Systems |
| V-Max systems introduced the concept of concurrent configuration change allowing customers to perform change management on the V-Max systems combined to work through single set of scripts rather than a step based process. |
| DMX-4 does present some challenges with mirror positions |
| Reduced mirror positions giving customers good flexibility for migration and other opportunities |
| No Virtual Provisioning with RAID 5 and RAID 6 devices |
| Virtual Provisioning allowed now with RAID 5 and RAID 6 devices |
| No Autoprovisioning groups |
| Concept of Autoprovisioning groups introduced with V-Max Systems |
| Minimum size DMX-4: A single storage cabinet system, supporting 240 drives can be purchased with a system cabinet |
| Minimum size V-Max SE (single engine) system can be purchased with 1 engine and 360 drive max. |
| No concepts of Engine, architecture based on slots |
| Each Engine consists of 4 Quad Core Intel Chips with either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB cache on each engine with 16 front-end ports with each engine. Backend ports per engine is 4 ports connecting System bay to storage bay |
| Power PC chips used on directors |
| Intel Quad Core chips used on Engines |
| Powerpath VE support for Vsphere – Virtual machines for DMX-4 |
| Powerpath VE supported for Vsphere – Virtual machines for V-Max |
| Concept of Backplane exists with this generation of storage |
| V-Max fits in the category of Modular Storage and eliminates the bottle neck of a backplane |
| DMX-4 was truly sold as a generation upgrade to DMX-3 |
| V-Max systems have been sold with a big marketing buzz around hundreds of engines, millions of IOPs, TB’s of cache, Virtual Storage |
| Systems cannot be federated |
| The concept of Federation has been introduced with V-Max systems, but systems are not federated in production or customer environments yet |
| Directors are connected to the system through a legacy backplane (DMX – Direct Matrix Architecture). |
| Engines are connected through copper RAPID IO interconnect at 2.5GB speed |
| No support for FCOE or 10GB Ethernet |
| No support for FCOE or 10GB Ethernet |
| No support for 8GB loop interface speeds |
| No support for 8GB loop interface speeds |
| Strong Marketing with DMX-4 and good success |
| Virtual Marketing for Virtual Matrix (V-Max) since the product was introduced with FAST as a sales strategy with FAST not available for at least until the later part of the year. |
| No support for InfiniBand expected with DMX-4 |
| Would InfiniBand be supported in the future to connect engines at a short or long distance (several meters) |
| No Federation |
| With Federation expected in the upcoming versions of V-Max, how would the cache latency play a role if you had federation between systems that are 10 to 10 meters away? |
| Global Cache on Global Memory Directors |
| Global Cache on local engines chips: again as cache is shared between multiple engines, cache latency is expected as multiple engines request this IO |
| DMX-4 is a monster storage system |
| The V-Max building blocks (engines) can create a much larger storage monster |
| 256GB total vault on DMX-4 systems |
| 200GB of vault space per Engine, with 8 engines, we are looking at 1.6TB of vault storage |
| Performance on DMX-4 has been great compared to its previous generation DMX, DMX2, DMX-3 |
| IOPS per PORT of V-Max Systems 128 MB/s Hits
385 Read
385 Write
IOPS for 2 PORT of V-Max Systems
128MB/s Hits
635 Read
640 Write |
| V-Max performs better compared to DMX-4 FICON |
| 2.2 x Performance on FICON compared to DMX-4 Systems. 2 Ports can have as many as 17000 IOPS on FICON |
| Large Metadata overhead with the amount of volumes, devices, cache slots, etc, etc |
| A reduction of 50 to 75% overhead with the V-Max related to metadata |
| SRDF Technology Supported |
| New SRDF/EDP (extended distant protection) Diskless R21 passthrough device, no disk required for this passthrough |
| Symmetrix Management Console 6.0 supported, no templates and wizards |
| Templates and Wizards within the new SMC 7.0 console |
| Total SRDF Groups supported 128 |
| Total SRDF Groups supported 250 |
| 16 Groups on Single Port for SRDF |
| 64 Groups on Single Port for SRDF |
| V-Max comparison on Connectivity |
| 2X Connectivity compared to the DMX-4 |
| V-Max comparison on Usability (Storage) |
| 3X usability compared to the DMX-4 |
| DMX-4 was the first version of Symmetrix where RAID6 support was rolled out |
| RAID 6 is 3.6 times better than the DMX-4 |
| RAID6 support on DMX-4 is and was a little premature |
| RAID 6 on V-Max (performance) is equivalent to RAID 1 on DMX-4 |
| SATA II performance on DMX-4 is better than V-Max |
| SATA II drives do not support the 520-byte style. EMC takes those 8 bytes (520 – 512) of calculation for data integrity T10-DIF standard proposal and writes it in blocks or chunks of 64K through out the entire drive causing performance degradation. |
| SATA II performance on DMX-4 is better than V-Max |
| The performance of SATA II drives on V-Max is bad the DMX-4 systems |
| Fiber Channel performance better compared to DMX and DMX-2’s. |
| Fiber Channel performance compared to DMX-4 improved by about 36% |
| DMX-4 start supporting 4GB interface host connectivity |
| Fiber Channel performance 5000 IOPS per channel |
| RVA not available on DMX-4 platforms |
| RVA: Raid Virtual Architecture allows to have one mirror position for RAID volumes allowing customers to used the rest of the 3 positions for either BCV’s, SRDF, Migration, etc, etc. |
| No MIBE and SIB with DMX-4. Rather the DMX-4 directors are connected through a common backplane. |
| MIBE: Matrix Interface Board Enclosure connects the Odd and the Evens or (Fabric A and Fabric B) Directors together. The SIB (System Interface Board) connects these engines together using Rapid IO |
| Director count goes from Director 1 on the left to Director 18 (Hex) on the right |
| Director count goes from 1 on the bottom to 16 (F) on the top, based on each engine having 2 directors. 8 Engines, 16 Directors. |
| 2 Directors failures if not in the same fabric or bus, rather are not DI’s (Dual Initiators) of each other will not cause a system outage or data loss / data unavailable |
| Single engine failure (2 Directors) will not cause Data Loss / Data Unavailable and the system will not cause an outage. Failed components can be Directors, Engines, MIBE, PS’s, Fan, Cache in a single Engine or 2 directors. |
