Sun StorageTek ST9990V vs. EMC DMX4

I am often asked what our competitive advantages are over EMC's DMX-4. Here are my personal thoughts:

On the EMC DMX-4:

The BIN file is so 70's.

The Absence of SPC-1 benchmark lends very serious doubt to EMC's Symmetrix DMX-4 performance claims. We proudly publish our SPC performance numbers on http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_all>.

The DMX-4 remains a legacy architecture that no longer provides the ability to scale linearly. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V is based on 4th generation Crossbar architecture.

The DMX-4's single footprint capacity approach for combined performance and archive workloads is cost prohibitive for large enterprises.

The direct matrix architecture of the DMX-4 is an antiquated approach to provide high performance inter-component networking.

The Symmetrix hardware-centric addressing limits the maximum number of Logical Volumes available to applications.

It's static mirrored cache and lack of dedicated shared memory limits user cache to less then 50% of installed capacity. ) The Sun StorageTek ST9990V has dynamic mirrored cache. Separate DATA and CONTROL cache!

The Symmetrix DMX-4 requires greater floor space and demands higher power and cooling then the ST9990V. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V does not!

The DMX-4's lack of support for ”Thin Provisioning” significantly increases a customer’s storage capacity and administration costs and does not at all help the Eco challenge many customers are facing today. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V offers Dynamic Provisioning. A great feature that doesn't require you to have all the physical storage to meet large growth DB demands.

The DMX-4 has Active/passive Disk Directors which limit the ability to support concurrent cloning and replication. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V has ACTIVE/ACTIVE disk directors.

The DMX-4's use of global memory for both data cache and control functions compromises access to customer data. The SunStorageTek ST9990V has separate data and control cache and paths.

The DMX4 does not offer Storage Virtual Partitioning which the Sun StorageTek ST9990V does. This is a excellent for supporting very stringent QoS and SLA requirements.

Virtualization:

EMC's Invista is an appliance-based virtualization solutions that inherently adds more complexity to an already complex environment. It is extremely difficult to install and administer.

For high performance storage that requires very low latency, why put the Invista in the path at all? Why introduce more latency? Since all the Invista targets are already on the SAN, why not just go straight to the high performance disk. The Sun Storage Tek ST9990V Virtualization does this and absolutely makes more sense!

With the Sun StoeageTek ST9990V virtualization we handle the high performance I/O internally with no added latency and still use virtualization to offload the second tier application loads. With Invista, you need the Invista switch and a high performance array.

EMC supports Invista on only 3 switches, Brocade AP7420, Cisco 9216 and Cisco 9500. If your customer has a significant McDATA investment, they are probably out of luck. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V virtualization supports a very diverse switch environment, just about all of them!

If Invista users are Brocade or Cisco customers, they will need 2 Invista switches per fabric for redundancy. Many customers have multiple fabrics per large array so they would need more new Invista boxes than they currently have arrays on the floor. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V does not have this limitation.

Another consideration, Invista is on the switch and can only see the storage on the fabric that it is part of. It cannot even see the storage on unconnected fabrics. A Sun Storage Tek ST9990V can support many fabrics simultaneously.

EMC's Appliance-based solutions cannot scale to customer requirements. The SunStorageTek ST9990V scales wonderfully to support all customers requirements.

Invista is a point product designed to address the virtualization support gap on the Symmetrix DMX. The Sun StorageTek ST9990V Virtualization is fully integrated in the HW/SW platform.

Invista has achieved limited market presence. The SunStorageTek ST9990V Virtualization does not have limited market presence (INSTALLATIONS).

The SunStorage Tek ST9900V virtualization offers: Greater Scalability, Greater Addressability, Greater Simplification, Single Replication Footprint, Superior Architecture, and Superior Resiliency

Posted at 11:29AM May 06, 2008 by gwaterson in General  |  Comments[2]