EMC's storage arrays do the heavy lifting

EMC has consolidated its Clariion and Celerra lines into the new VNX series of enterprise storage arrays.

At the same time, the storage giant for the first time is targeting down-market and department-level customers with VNXe, a low-cost version of the storage arrays series that offers many of the same features of the higher-end line, including high speed, high availability, scalability and snapshot data protection. List prices start at $US9,513 for a terabyte of 15K SAS storage in a 2U enclosure; $US12,079 with redundancy.

EMC invited the CRN US Test Centre to Hopkinton, Mass, home of the company's storage development labs, to evaluate the VNXe one week prior to the launch. They were still tweaking parts of the user interface, but the underlying functionality appeared to be solid and fully baked. It was the interface that we were most interested in, since EMC characterised simplicity and ease-of-setup and use as primary differentiators of the line along with cost and versatility.

"The typical user of a VNXe product will be the small company or departments," said Steve Marchesano, director of product management for EMC's Storage Software Platform Group. And those target customers, he added, sometimes include departments that have found themselves cut off from the larger organisation and are doing their own buying, installations and support. "And the person doing the set-up and maintenance often has no experience with dedicated storage systems and are unfamiliar with terms like storage pool,iSCSI and LUN," he said.

To cater to novice installers, EMC has attempted to automate most of the process of discovering unconfigured devices (via UPnP), configuring storage pools, setting up an Exchange Storage Server, allocating storage to VMware instances, and so on. And from what we saw, its Flex-based Element Manager browser software does a pretty good job of shielding installers from these complexities, automatically selecting defaults based on industry best practices and using vendor-specific language and terminology as the case may be. The software provides two levels of administrator, permitting advanced staff to see more of what's going on and preventing those with less skill to cause damage.

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