Recently, during the EMC World 2015 EMC announced the vVNX ( known as Project Liberty during development phase), the software version of EMC VNXe. With EMC vVNX, customers can take advantage of the unified VNXe solution without having dedicated storage hardware.
Things are going virtual, day-by-day.
EMC vVNX solution provides SAN and NAS functionalities running on standard x86 hardware running VMware ESX. vVNX community edition is for test and development environments and is free for unlimited period of time. You can download it here
vVNX runs on VMware ESXi 5.5 or later versions. More environmental requirements from the product site below.
- VMware infrastructure: VMware vCenter and ESXi Server, release 5.5 or later
- Network infrastructure: 2x 1 GbE OR 2x 10 GbE
- Battery-backed Hardware RAID controller required (512MB NV Cache recommended)
The current version is limited to 4 TB of storage and 32 Filesystems. But the system gives features including virtual provisioning and snapshots. You may refer the product page for more reading on configuration and support. Also, You may watch the EMC World demo of the vVNX by Chad Sakac.
My take : As the environments are going towards software-defined solutions, EMC took a very good step forward which may have a huge impact in the storage market. Even though it is not a multi hypervisor solution, the choice of the most commonly used solution – VMware – may attract more customers towards this solution. The standard x86 hardware support and the market value for the hardware solutions – VNX and VNXe – , will give an edge in marketing for EMC among others. With the non-commercial version today in market, we should expect the entry of the production version soon.
EMC VNX solutions getting delivered in CD’s instead of big wooden cartons, really..!
