Cisco MDS and Dell EMC set new standards for enterprise storage performance

An undeniable trend in the storage industry is what one might refer to as the democratization of all-flash storage as the technology becomes more economical and, therefore, more relevant for most use cases. Indeed, flash storage remains critical for Tier 0/Tier 1 applications such as enterprise databases, and its growing popularity to support broader sets of workloads has industry experts estimating that virtually the entire market will be based on flash-based technologies over the next 10 years.

Dell EMC has been ahead of the trend curve with strategic storage introductions to meet customer requirements of all scope and size. This includes the introduction of the VMAX 250F last fall, a smaller, powerhouse of a system that can still scale impressively to more than 1 million IOPS and 1PB of capacity fully loaded.

Today, Dell EMC is addressing the higher end of the solution spectrum with the introduction of the VMAX 950F all-flash storage array as the newest member of its premier enterprise offering.  The VMAX 950F scales significantly in both capacity and performance, and has set a new industry benchmark for enterprise storage array performance.  Dell EMC ‘s All Flash Portfolio delivers mission-critical availability while offering a wealth of data services that help customers to scale without compromising performance or availability.

Why VMAX 950F and the Cisco MDS

To enable the optimal storage network for this system, Cisco has worked closely with Dell EMC to integrate Cisco MDS 9000 platform with all Dell EMC flash storage offerings to provide customers a choice of industry-leading architectures that simplify, automate, and transform IT – while helping customers accelerate the journey to the cloud. To better serve the new application requirements, Cisco recently  introduced a New high-performance Analytics ready 32G Fibre Channel Module and NVMe over Fibre Channel support enabling customers to scale  flash deployments efficiently.

The VMAX 950F is ideal for mission-critical applications that demand the performance of flash and 24×7 (continuous) availability  – such as core banking, credit card processing, electronic billing, or electronic hospital record systems. The VMAX 950F, with its advanced data services, is ideal for consolidating multiple, diverse workloads and delivers an unparalleled architecture  able to scale up performance and scale out capacity. It is also versatile with support for mixed data formats (open systems, mainframe, IBM i, block/file), which are commonly found in any enterprise today. The VMAX 950F also launches with the benefit of DELL EMC’s trusted reputation and vast experience in consolidating mission-critical operations on single platforms.

In addition to the VMAX 950F, DELL EMC also introduced updates to its HYPERMAX OS, which allows customers to deploy flash storage and manage data efficiently. Some notable new features include,

Encryption External Key Manager for centralized key management,

Secure Snapshots for internal governace and enhanced protection against intentional or accidental deletion of snapshots,

VMAX NDM with SRDF/S, RecoverPoint for VMAX and ProtectPoint for Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange.

The Cisco MDS is an optimal storage director companion to Dell EMC’s VMAX 950F by integrating flash storage into a cohesive storage networking infrastructure that can be managed and scaled.   The Cisco MDS is an open, flexible, and standards-based platform that integrates well with a wide variety of storage systems. The MDS offers a combination of performance, non-stop operations, investment protection and flexibility that makes it an ideal complement to the capabilities of the VMAX 950F. The combination of the Cisco MDS and the VMAX 950F is the latest success in a long line of game-changing successes from Dell EMC, the storage industry leader, and Cisco, the leader in data center networking.

For more information, please visit Cisco Storage Networking and IP Storage Networking site
EMC PR: https://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2017/20170508-05.htm

Tony Antony
Sr Marketing Manager
DC Products and Solutions