EMC bumps VMAX array to 4 petabytes

EMC has released a new family of its flagship VMAX series of storage arrays, which have huge storage capacities and are backed by the latest enterprise-grade Intel processors.

The company gave details on the VMAX 10K, 20K and 40K arrays on Monday at EMC World in Las Vegas. The 40K can handle up to 4 petabytes of storage split across 3,200 2.5-inch drives — almost double the capacity of its predecessor, the Symmetrix VMAX 20K, which was announced in April 2009.

"With today's news, the VMAX Family is building upon its existing portfolio of high-end solutions, and delivering new hardware and software capabilities that are purpose-built for these hybrid cloud environments," Brian Gallagher, president of EMC's enterprise storage division, wrote in a statement.

Like every other IT vendor, EMC has said the array has been designed for "cloud" and "big data". However, many of EMC's prospective and existing customers come from verticals like finance and healthcare and will more be interested in these arrays for the storage of large, mission-critical datasets.

The VMAX 40K can move more bits around faster than its predecessor, with twice the number of input-output operations per second (IOPS) of any competing array, EMC said in a statement. It can use up to 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeon six-core processors and have up to 2TB of mirrored ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM.

The company has also released some 2.5-inch multi-level cell flash drives for the array, which lets VMAX buyers swap the SSDs in for the HDDs to provide greater I/O rates.

The three new arrays support a free software technology named Federated Tier Storage, which provides data integrity checking. This technology also lets them function as pass-through devices or as additional capacity pools for Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools (FAST VP) stacks, EMC said.

The arrays are shipping now. Pricing was not disclosed.