SCIENCE

EMC announced that it has shattered the performance limits it previously set for storage throughput and bandwidth in a VMware vSphere 5 environment. With performance and scalability parameters now stretched out even further, EMC is accelerating customers' journey to the cloud by removing potential performance-oriented barriers for organizations as they virtualize their mission critical applications.

Performance testing of an EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage system with VMware vSphere 5 achieved in excess of 1,000,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), which is three times the previous ceiling of 364,000 IOPS achieved by utilizing three EMC CLARiiON CX4 storage systems with VMware vSphere 4. The Symmetrix VMAX system was configured with 8 engines and 960 disk drives. The testing showed that at peak load the Symmetrix VMAX was able to support a VM-level response time of 2 milliseconds and illustrated the ability of both VMware vSphere 5 and the Symmetrix VMAX to leverage the scaling and performance of the latest Intel Xeon processors and powerful Emulex Lightpulse Host Bus Adapters. With this new storage performance level, organizations can now confidently virtualize even their largest online transaction processing (OLTP) applications, with the most stringent workloads and lowest latency service level agreements at a lower cost while gaining greater agility than in a traditional physical environment.

Bandwidth testing of a single EMC VNX unified storage system with VMware vSphere 5 achieved a workload of 10GBps, over 3.5 times more than the previous VMware vSphere limit which required three EMC CLARiiON CX4 arrays, illustrating the power of a VNXsystem. The test also highlights the bandwidth, performance, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness of converged storage networks -and the new VMware vSphere 5 software FCoE initiator coupled with the Intel x520 network interface. The most extreme bandwidth workloads including Big Data analytics, data warehousing and media, can be virtualized on the latest technologies from EMC and VMware and gain lower costs and greater agility than a physical approach.

EMC offers broad technology support and the industry's most comprehensive integration with VMware vSphere 5 and cloud infrastructure suite. The combination of EMC's industry-leading products, solutions and services with VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technologies accelerates the customer journey to the cloud - lowering IT costs and improving business agility.

"VMware and EMC are committed to delivering high-performance solutions that can easily handle the most demanding workloads," said Hatem Naguib, vice president, alliances, VMware. "EMC storage systems are designed to take advantage of the significant performance and bandwidth improvements in the new VMware vSphere 5, enabling customers to virtualize their business-critical applications with confidence."

"The performance benchmark pushes the limits of scalability in virtual and cloud environments. Customers can now confidently virtualize even their most demanding mission critical applications knowing that their investments in EMC and VMware vSphere infrastructure will be able to grow with them," said EMC's Chad Sakac, Vice President, VMware Technical Alliance.