Last Thursday I was able to attend my last session of the conference by Mike Bresnahan and Paul Martin who live across the pond in Cork, Ireland titled: “VMAX3: The replication Revolution”  Paul is @rawstorage on twitter and also an EMCElect.  I had various conversations with him throughout the week on the new VMAX3 and it was great talking to him.

The presentation began with Mike Bresnahan talking about the new SNAPVX structure, its limits and feeds and speeds.  SNAPVX is the replacement for old timefinder/bcv, etc commands and it is a LOT better.  Gone are the days of setting up consistency groups, creating a lun for every clone, etc.  This has a great effect on space efficiency and obviously management overhead.

Here are some bullet points:

• Targetless Snapshots conserve resources
• Track sharing
• Target lun only required for host access (linked-target)
• Ease of Use
• Storage group operations enable protection of entire applications
• Snapshots identified by user-defined name
• Automatic expiration
• Create up to 1024 unique environments from a single snapshot
• Snapshots and linking targets
• Snapshots are targetless
• Target lun linked to snapshot to present point-in-time to a host
• Standard thin device
• Nocopy by default
• Link multiple targets to a snapshot
• SRDF interoporablity
• Cascading sessions example
• Unlimited cascading
• Each linked target lun can have 256 snapshots
• Each snapshot can have multiple linked targets
• Break the cascade at any point
• Storage groups control all snaps.
• Storage group operations
• Natively consistent
• Automatic snapshot expiration
• TTL optional setting
• SRPs could be used for source/targets  but Hypermax has a SRP reserved capacity setting
• When SRP reached 90% full only host writes can consume the last 10%
• Alerts available to warn of approaching the limit.

In addition to the above Mike talked about cascading snapshots, and the relink functionality.  Relinking a differential copy of a SNAPVX snapshot does take a separate lun, but it opens up the functionalities of being able to mount said snapshot to another host, or use it to archive off things…or ultimately restore back to the original lun if for some reason you do something really bad during testing and have to revert back to an older snap 🙂

After the work on SNAPVX, Paul began to talk about SRDF functionality.  I was a little bit dissapointed that they didn’t really cover the new “Active/Active” replication, but I understand why they did because it was just announced a couple days before. Here are a few bullets from the SRDF portion of the presentation:

• SRDF Simplified Setup w/ Unisphere
• Uses storage groups
• You can set modes in SRDF
•  SRDF Star still requires a consistency group and is CLI only.

All in all this was a great session and it was very refreshing to see all of the updates that the VMAX3 brings to the table.  I am very much looking forward to seeing what is next in this space and how things pan out with the VMAX3 with our customers!

@sangeek