Origins of EMC VNX from EMC's CLARiiON and Celerra platforms

Among all the many storage announcements from EMC today, perhaps the most impactful to many is the new VNX family.  The new VNX models can best be seen as a linear extension and convergence of the wildly successful CLARiiON and Celerra lines - but goes farther than either one individually. And the new VNXe is in many regards an entirely new product designed to serve an entirely new market segment.  Both products will likely be extremely hot topics in the industry storage discussion during 2011 and beyond.  

The Storage Array Landscape

Perhaps the most hotly contested portion of the traditional storage market is the dual-controller mid-tier market -- it's the bread and butter of external shared storage. Dual controller designs provide essential redundancy that single controllers can't, albeit at additional cost.  That being said, any dual-controller design that experiences a single controller failure operates at 50% (or less) of its rated performance -- occasionally making a case for more sophisticated designs that use multiple controllers such as EMC's VMAX. Storage vendors in this particular segment have to bring their best game, since competition is strong -- and occasionally very loud! The VNX Series announcement represents an entirely new generation of EMC's core products in this important category, and thus becomes a new benchmark for comparisons.

A Bit of Context

Infrastructure funding is usually limited to a per-project basis -- even though an expanded view of the landscape and timeframes might lead to other alternatives. The reality is that there's only so much money in the budget for the next storage acquisition -- and that's that.  Storage platforms with initial acquisition costs outside of the allocated funds just don't make the cut -- regardless of their potential strong points.  It's going to be how much can you get done -- and how quickly -- without any specialized knowledge, training, documentation, support, etc.  Just to make the point -- there's no training, manuals, certification, etc. for consumer products like the iPad.

EMC believes that storage in this category should ideally be easily usable by an IT generalist, vs. trained storage experts.  This means workflows supported in the context of the application or task, avoiding the use of storage jargon, intelligent defaults throughout, and so on. The model is much like setting up a big-screen TV -- you want to get to the good part (using it!) rather than ...