EMC Goes for Hyper-Consolidation of Enterprise Storage With VMAX³, TwinStrata Acquisition update from July 2014

In a significant move to advance its flagship VMAX storage line EMC launched VMAX³ hybrid systems and announced that it has acquired cloud storage management company TwinStrata.

The storage giant announced this news plus several other announcements about XtremeIO all-flash arrays, Isilon updates and integration with Pivotal for Data Lake Hadoop bundles were announced at its Redefine Possible event Tuesday in London.

Hyper-converged infrastructure

The new VMAX³ has Hypermax converged storage hypervisor and operating system as a foundation, which lets it embed storage infrastructure services like cloud access, data mobility and data protection directly on the array. This also gives it the ability to perform real-time non-disruptive data services. Support for hybrid cloud comes in the form of dynamically allocating up to 384 Intel Ivy Bridge processor cores between mixed workloads.

The addition of Hypermax and EMC's Dynamic Virtual Matrix architecture to the VMAX³ family are significant on top of sheer horsepower and scalability offered by the product family. It empowers diverse workloads across a range of hypervisors and virtual machine types and simplifies management across private storage and public cloud platforms.  A variety of VMAX³ models fit various storage and performance needs, with the top-of-the-line 400K model offering up to 720 drives per rack, up to 8 VMAX3 engines with 48 CPU cores each and maximum raw capacity of 4.7 petabytes.

The TwinStrata cloud-integrated appliance will be integrated with the VMAX solution to create what EMC calls its enterprise data services platform. TwinStrata co-founder and CEO Nicos Vekiarides said that once integrated with VMAX³ the new data service platform will allow automatic tiering of workloads even more seamlessly for off-premise storage capacity expansion, data protection and disaster recovery.

Massachusetts-based TwinStrata launched its CloudArray about four years ago as an easy yet powerful solution for primary storage, disaster recovery, multi-site file sharing, data archiving or offsite backup needs. With support for many of the leading public cloud vendors TwinStrata's cloud tiering technology allows customers to save money by moving infrequently accessed data to the public cloud.

"The revolutionary transformation of VMAX³ – from enterprise storage to an open enterprise data service platform – delivers customers the ability to transform a traditional storage infrastructure to an agile data center infrastructure," said Brian Gallagher, Midrange Systems Division president at EMC. "Simply put, it’s hyper-consolidation for existing workloads and their underlying infrastructure. As the first open enterprise data service platform, VMAX³ is the foundation for hybrid cloud as customers look to deliver Storage-as-a-Service with simple, policy-based service levels.”