It’s managed by Unisphere.
It has no X-Blades or Control Station.
It’s uses Active-Active Disk Processor Units.
It’s an all Ethernet storage system.
It’s designed with tool free Customer Replaceable Modules.
It comes with Thin Provisioning, Compression and Snapshots.
It supports Flex I/O expansion, Remote Replication and Application Awareness.
It runs the VNX Operating Environment on a dual core Intel processor in less than 4GB of RAM.
It’s a new family of product.
It’s the VNXe
Yes the superscript matters as that’s the name. VNXe isn’t the name but it’s easier to write, so while incorrect it’s allowable. What does the superscript e stand for?
Nothing.
But I like to think I stands for everything I want it to stand for.
Of all the products being launched today VNXe and the Data Domain Archiver are the products I love the most. I love them because they bring me into new market segments with new customers to whom I previously didn’t have anything to offer.
Price wise it sits nicely just above Iomega’s rack mount systems but just below the low end of the VNX range.
The VNXe family is storage for the IT generalist because guess what? Generalists don’t care about carving up storage and don’t want to spend time on the mathematics required to figure out how they should lay things out to support a workload of a few dozen or a few hundred Exchange users.
So we decided we weren’t going to ask them to do that.
Instead it takes less than ten clicks of a mouse as we’ve placed the EMC best practices directly into the product. Exchange, Hyper-V, VMware, iSCSI, NFS & CIFS shares there are best practices in there for all of them and more will be rolled out as they’re required.
It takes your application requirement inputs and the system does the maths and the layout for you.
When we get right down to it Generalists don’t care about storage. They care about Applications. Which is why VNXe is designed to be application centric. Storage management concepts have little to no place in the day to day thinking of an IT Generalist so expecting them to digest those concepts is ridiculous and a recipe for disaster.
Who cares about replication relationships? IT Generalists don’t. Ditch that storage management terminology and all that comes with it. It really is a case of copy my Application/my data from here to there.
Storage Pools and Storage Pool Services? They neither want or need to know about any of that. Specialists might be interested in block sizes for Thin LUNS, Generalists aren’t and as it’s VNX OE from top to bottom current and future Storage Pool services can be enabled to meet demand in that segment.
Need support? Want to watch How to videos? Or have a question for other VNXe users? Click the relevant button in Unisphere.
The VNXe represents everything we know about how people use storage in a system for people who know nothing about how storage is used.
And we’re going to sell a ton of them.
