The past couple days have been awesome here at EMCWorld 2015.  I wanted to share with you information about VMAX3 Performance through a couple sessions I attended plus some conversations with several EMC engineers.

Here are some Highlights:

No more CPU bind on FA’s.

In previous VMAX revisions you had to be careful with CPU bind on traffic that went through ports.  This was difficult to monitor and you had to be very careful with balance / worry about fan out ratio, etc. Now with the VMAX3, you can have the power of all cores of the CPU to a single port, and the VMAX3 has a great way of managing all of this under the covers.  Minimal port count is about 4, but you’ll want to balance across directors.

No need to use 15K drives anymore

I’ll talk to this a bit later but 15K’s are now out in favor of 2 tier configurations. 10K is ½ the cost with similar performance to 15K.  120 IOPS, 10-12 msec response

Here are some bullet points from the performance session:

• Flash 3000+ IOPS <1 – ~1 msec response time
• Configure all 2.5” drives for best performance and density
• 2.5” DAE supports 120 Drives,
• virtually every system will have flash and 2.5” DAE
• 2.5” 10K offers 14,400 IOPS per DAE at 10-12 msec
• whereas 3.5” 7200 offers 3,000 IOPS per DAE at 17-20 msec
• 7200 RPM only available in 3.5” form factor
• there are use cases for 7200 RPM drives but not for general use stuff so virtually all VMAX3’s shipping won’t have any 7200 RPM drives in them.
• Three supported raid types between all disks
  • Raid 1
  • Raid 5
  • Raid 6

Virtually all configurations will be a single SRP (Storage Resource Pool) and a 2 tier configuration using only FLASH and 10K RPM drives. They do this to not only provide the best performance, but also is more simple to manage and provides the best Skew performance.

Skew Performance:

• 85/15 is typical of most workloads
• skew can vary during a business cycle and over life of an array
• skew and traditional tiering
• typical vmax 1st gen drive mix is 3/27/70
  • 3% flash 27% 10K fc 70% 7200 sata
  • Provided OK performance but when not monitored you would run into performance issues faster.
• Typical VMAX3 drive mix is a lot heavier on EFD with no SATA/7200rpm drives

With the VMAX3 and a two tiered array, flash and 1.2 will do most workloads and Skew performance is effected less.

Monitor the system with unisphere – If you are NOT monitoring, you will have no idea what your array is doing

VMAX3 Defaults work!

Start with optimized SLO if you’re not sure, uses 10K first then EFD, 7.2 as a last resort

EMC will always configure a single SRP but you can order one with multiple if you have regulatory reasons

How do I know which FAs to plus servers in…

• VMAX3 is a lot easier
• All cores in the emulation can service 1 port
• Greatly reduces port sharing contention
• Burst handling is much better in VMAX3
• Two ports across two directors for OLTP for starters
• Suitable for large percentage of workloads
• May want 4 ports with 2 each on dual fabrics for secillency
• Four ports for DSS/large block workloads
• Provides maximum port level aggregate bandwidth
• Linear scaling as ports are added

 Highlights on Lun creation

• No more meta volumes
• 16TB luns
• Single VMAX3 volume outperforms vmax metas by a lot
• Can do 10’s of thousands of IOs
• Offers other advantages
• Ease of provisioning
• Reduced lun count
• Maintaining Balance
• Plan ahead

That is the highlights from the airplane!  More good stuff coming up in the next week or so 🙂

@sangeek