EMC VFCache First to Deduplicate Server Flash Cache

EMC Press Release

EMC VFCache First to Deduplicate Server Flash Cache

Drives New Levels of Efficiency with Deduplication; Interoperable with VMware vSphere vMotion; Builds Foundation for Integration with EMC VMAX

VMworld – San Francisco, CA - August 28, 2012

News Summary:

• EMC VFCache™ solution delivers in-line deduplication of cached data—an industry first.
• EMC VFCache is now interoperable with VMware™ vSphere® vMotion® technology.
• EMC VFCache delivers new capabilities that form the foundation for integration with the EMC® VMAX® Family.
• Significant VFCache hardware and software updates improve performance and capacity, including support for Cisco UCS Blade Servers.

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Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today at VMworld® 2012 set a new benchmark for enterprise Flash efficiency by delivering in-line cache deduplication on EMC® VFCache™, a server Flash caching solution that turbo-charges performance in mission-critical Oracle, Microsoft and SAP application environments—up to 3X in some cases. EMC also extended its leadership in VMware environments, with new interoperability between VFCache and VMware® vSphere® vMotion to enable seamless and flexible movement of virtual machines in environments accelerated by VFCache. EMC continues to invest in the industry's most comprehensive Flash portfolio, delivering all the performance benefits of Flash without sacrificing the benefits of network storage—high availability, disaster recovery, data integrity, and reliability. This unique approach is why EMC shipped a record amount of Flash capacity in the second quarter of 2012.

Technology Highlights:

• More Efficient: EMC is leveraging its leadership in deduplication for backup environments and applying that expertise to caching. With the addition of in-line deduplication of cached data for a larger effective cache, the cache size of VFCache is significantly increased in environments with applications leveraging high deduplication gains. This capability delivers better cost per gigabyte and extends the life expectancy of the card.
• Deeper Integration: VFCache is now more deeply integrated at the virtual, storage and server levels to maximize mission-critical application environments. VFCache now delivers:
  • Automation of VMware vSphere vMotion environments for efficient administration. VFCache interoperability with vSphere vMotion makes it faster and easier to achieve continuous up-time and fluid operations, complete environment maintenance, and enable seamless migrations—helping customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. Through the EMC VSI plug-in for VMware vCenter™, EMC enables VMware administrators to handle other priority tasks, and ensures business continuity with no system downtime when migrating operations.
  • Simplified management, more streamlined operations, and greater visibility into operational information. EMC VFCache contains the foundational capabilities to provide EMC VMAX storage administrators with more operational information, such as VFCache's relationships to specific LUNS, more performance statistics, and error condition reporting. These capabilities will support superior storage management relative to other solutions in the industry, and represent another key step toward EMC's vision of high performance automated tiered storage. Customers continue to benefit from VFCache's turbocharged performance with the protection for which EMC storage is trusted around the world. EMC is also committed to integrating VFCache with the rest of EMC's storage portfolio—including EMC VNX™—in 2013.
  • Support for Cisco's upcoming offering of LSI's customized PCIe Flash mezzanine cards for UCS B-Series Blade Servers (announced in May 2012).
• Better Performance: The latest version of VFCache supports multiple PCIe cards per server and delivers more capacity options—with support for new 700GB PCIe cards—to cache larger working sets and offer greater performance to customers. In addition, EMC continues to optimize and advance the performance of demanding enterprise workloads by lowering latency through tuning of the VFCache caching algorithms.

In addition to VFCache, customers with mixed workloads can choose from EMC's hybrid arrays armed with EMC FAST™ (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology that automates the movement of "hot" data onto Flash drives and moves "cold" data to high-capacity drives. For VDI or test and development environments with 100% "hot" data, customers will be able to leverage all-Flash arrays that will deliver the raw performance required with innovative new technologies from "Project X" through EMC's acquisition of XtremIO (announced in May 2012). For persistent data stores with performance intensive workloads—including high-frequency trading or online gaming—EMC will offer "Project Thunder", a server network attached appliance built entirely of high-speed PCIe Flash (announced in February 2012).

Availability

Deduplication and other new VFCache enhancements are available today through EMC and its channel partners.

Customer Quotes:

Henrik Sørensen, SAP Operations Manager at L'Oréal Danmark SNS

"L'Oréal has made cosmetics for a century—and we are the worldwide cosmetic leader. We manage 27 global brands that are distributed throughout 130 countries. Information is gold to us—and drives our ability to innovate. The benefits of Flash technology are a key piece of L'Oréal SNS IT strategy. We use VFCache to boost the performance of our SAP application environment. With a powerful capability like deduplication—support for higher capacity drives—and VMware affinity, EMC is delivering L'Oréal SNS with an even better, faster and simpler way to achieve peak performance results for our mission-critical applications."

Scott Heffner, Network Operations Manager, Wentworth-Douglass Hospital

"Wentworth-Douglass Hospital has evolved and grown since its doors opened in 1906. We are now one of the largest acute care hospitals in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire and Southern Maine. Data is central to delivering the best care possible to patients, which is why we rely on EMC technologies—including VMAX 10K, EMC RecoverPoint™, Avamar®, and Data Domain® solutions—in a VMware virtualized environment. With new VFCache support for Cisco UCS blade servers, we will use VFCache in our virtual EMC VMAX environment to achieve the performance required of our demanding IT needs. One thing hasn't changed since 1906, and that is that the patient is still the center of our timeless tradition of providing compassionate and comprehensive care—EMC technologies help enable us to deliver exactly that."

Industry Analyst Quote:

Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director, Solid State Drives and Hard Drive Components, IDC

"IDC expects that annual Flash capacity shipped in the enterprise will grow by 20X by 2016 thanks to the ever-growing number of applications, the digitization of data, cloud and Big Data. Storage I/O is a critical performance bottleneck for many data intensive applications. Flash is the essential ingredient in the industry's race for application speed. With these latest updates to EMC VFCache, EMC is delivering efficiency that didn't previously exist for the customer. This addition to its comprehensive Flash portfolio is an important evolution."

Partner Quotes:

Eric Kaplan,VP Engineering at Ahead

"Ahead enables companies to take advantage of key technologies driving the next-generation data center. As our clients' trusted technology advisor, we partner with EMC to provide best-of-breed products and services to our customers, providing the support and direction they need to make IT a competitive advantage for their business. EMC VFCache helps our customers' applications reach the performance they need while delivering the data protection their business demands. With added capabilities for deduplication and user-initiated VMware vMotion, VFCache delivers new levels of efficiencies to our customers."

Steve Gillaspy, Sr. Director Product Management Unified Computing Systems, Cisco

"Flash storage has proven to be a very disruptive and opportunistic technology to drive application performance. We are working with EMC and other partners to continue to deliver solutions that help to enable our customers to run their mission-critical applications faster. With EMC VFCache and Cisco UCS Blade Servers, customers are finding a simpler way to drive efficiency and productivity in the data center."

Gary Green, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware

"VFCache interoperability with VMware vMotion is about simplicity and automation for our customers. We're committed to delivering customers flexibility, efficiency and choice. As virtual environments continue to grow—and become more complex—it is interoperability like VFCache and vMotion, as well as continued innovation in PCIe Flash, that will address what customers need to handle the IT transformation occurring in the market today."

EMC Quote:

Mark Sorenson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Flash Business Unit, EMC

"Since 2008 EMC has led the market in enterprise Flash innovation—setting in motion the industry's move to Flash enabled storage arrays. EMC is uniquely positioned to help customers take advantage of Flash technology, and we continue to invest and innovate to offer purpose-built solutions for specific use cases and deployment options. Our approach is 'no-compromise'—offering hybrid Flash enabled storage arrays, Flash in the server, and Flash via the network. With the addition of deduplication, VMware interoperability, and performance enhancements to VFCache, we're yet again setting the pace for the industry—and delivering customers—the most optimized and efficient offering."

Additional Resources:

• Read the Demartek evaluation report
• Read the VFCache data sheet
• Read about VFCache in virtualized Oracle environments
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn

About EMC

EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset — information — in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.EMC.com.

Press release:

Business Applications Run Up to 90% Faster with New Server Cache Solutions from NetApp and Its Partners

NetApp Unveils Flash Accel, Extends Technology Alliance Program, and Signs Resale Agreement to Integrate Server Cache Solutions with Data ONTAP for End-to-End Storage Management

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Aug. 21, 2012 — With storage capacity requirements increasing at exponential rates, Flash memory continues to gain popularity as a powerful complement to traditional hard-disk storage. Its ability to dramatically break through the input/output latency barrier—a key inhibitor to fast and scalable applications—makes an efficient and flexible Flash strategy a critical part of an agile data infrastructure. From their server to their back-end storage, cost- and performance-conscious system architects must balance how Flash is used within their organizations to maximize application performance, minimize rising IT costs, preserve high availability, protect data, and simplify management.

Today, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) extended its Virtual Storage Tiering (VST) strategy by introducing NetApp® Flash Accel™, expanded its Technology Alliance Program to include server caching hardware and software partners, and unveiled a reseller relationship with Fusion-io. This comprehensive strategy update to VST enables end-to-end storage management for customers with physical and virtualized environments, from the user-accessible Flash memory on the server to the cost-effective hard-disk storage on the back end. Flash Accel will be on display at the NetApp booth, #1402, at VMworld San Francisco on August 26–30. 

VST also creates new opportunities for partners to work with NetApp to develop innovative technologies that integrate closely with the capabilities of Data ONTAP® software, NetApp’s leading storage management operating system. Through Data ONTAP and other VST innovations such as NetApp Flash Cache and NetApp Flash Pool, IT administrators can now manage server-level, controller-level, and disk-level Flash memory and back-end hard-disk storage usage within a single data management infrastructure. This lets them meet service levels and gain greater storage efficiencies by enabling the right storage media to be used at the right time for the right data.

NetApp Flash Accel Can Accelerate Application Performance by Up to 90% by Turning Server Flash into “Hot” Data Storage
NetApp Flash Accel can speed application performance by turning server-side Flash into a cache for storing “hot,” frequently accessed data. NetApp testing shows that by storing up to 2TB of hot data in server Flash memory, application and server latency can be reduced by up to 90%^[1] and IOPS are increased by 80%. And, by off-loading “hot” IOPS at the server, Flash Accel helps reduce demand on back-end FAS storage.

As part of a comprehensive Virtual Storage Tiering strategy, server caching delivers:

• Application and Server Performance Acceleration: Accelerates enterprise applications and server performance by as much as 90% by deploying server cache on virtual machines.
• Highest Levels of Data Integrity and Reliability: Coordinates with Data ONTAP back-end platforms so that a persistent copy of all data is always stored on the back-end Data ONTAP platform, benefiting from the high availability and data protection of Data ONTAP; relies on the high availability and data protection of Data ONTAP.
• Coherency and Integration with Data ONTAP: End-to-end data coherency issues are identified and resolved, enabling deployment of high-confidence solutions.
• Broad Use Case Coverage: Customers can deploy solutions over a wide range of applications and operating environments using NetApp validated partner solutions.
• Maximum Flexibility: NetApp validated solutions provide maximum flexibility, allowing customers to deploy any server caching solutions (software and hardware) that have been validated by NetApp.

In addition to the above, Flash Accel has these key features:

• Flexibility at the Server Level: Provides the freedom to choose any server PCI-e flash card or SSD flash device.
• End-to-End Intelligent Data Coherency: Addresses data coherency issues that can cause data corruption using automated and efficient data coherency detection and correction software technology.
• Cache Persistency and Durability: Preserves cache content consistently with applications in the event of server and VM reboot and crashes so that cache restarts in a warm state; enables consistently high performance.

NetApp Expands Alliance Partner Ecosystem to Include Server-Caching Partners 
Reinforcing its commitment to enabling an open partner ecosystem for intelligent caching, NetApp is expanding its Alliance Partner Program to embrace hardware and software server-caching partners looking to develop solutions with NetApp. Partners can submit and qualify server-caching solutions as "NetApp validated” in accordance with established criteria for coherence and integration with Data ONTAP and Flash Accel. Among the first partners to submit server-caching solutions for qualification are Fusion-io, LSI, Micron, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions, STEC, and Virident.

NetApp, together with its partners, will provide the widest coverage for its customers’ infrastructures as they deploy server-side caching to deliver increased ROI. This will include the broadest support for different hypervisors and operating systems. NetApp validated solutions will enable quick deployment of partner-specific innovations in the rapidly evolving server flash and caching market.

NetApp Signs Technology Reseller Agreement with Fusion-io
As part of its commitment to providing customers with a single source for Virtual Storage Tier technologies, NetApp has entered into a resale agreement with Fusion-io (NYSE: FIO), a leader in Flash memory solutions. NetApp will resell Fusion-io ioMemory platform products and two server caching software products: ioTurbine™ for virtualized environments and Direct Cache™ for non-virtualized environments.

Revlon Looks to NetApp Flash Accel to Run Applications at Peak Performance
In recent years, global cosmetics company Revlon has undergone a remarkable IT transformation: a move to a completely virtualized environment that enables Revlon IT to deliver more services faster, better, and cheaper. It now has more than 530 applications running on its private cloud, which supports more than 15,000 automated application moves a month and 14,000 transactions a second. To keep its applications running at peak performance, Revlon requires rapid access to data across the storage area network. In collaboration with NetApp, Revlon has been testing Flash Accel to reduce latency, improve server and storage performance, and simplify storage management.

"Revlon and NetApp share the vision that storage is a critical foundation for a virtualized agile data infrastructure," said David Giambruno, senior vice president and chief information officer, Revlon. "Currently, Revlon has more than 530 and counting business-critical applications, including SAP®, multiple enterprise databases, multiple ERP and MRP systems, financials, warehouse management, Microsoft® Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint®, and virtual desktops, running on VMware® virtual machines. To ensure that these applications run at peak performance requires an approach to storage that minimizes the latency between operations. We've been testing Flash Accel from NetApp and have already seen considerable efficiency and performance gains from our applications that for our business means that our scientists and marketers have greater access to the data that drives the creation and sales of our glamorous products."

Additional Supporting Quotes:

• Tim Russell, Vice President and General Manager, Data Lifecyle Ecosystem Group, NetApp 
  "Creating an agile data infrastructure depends heavily on anticipating and managing application performance needs. NetApp Flash Accel and caching products from our partners add a persistent and durable storage layer on the server, which, when used as part of our Virtual Storage Tiering approach, leads to the automatic management of data from storage to the application based on affinity and workload. This results in dramatic application and server performance boosts that will accelerate how business is conducted using virtualized environments.”

NetApp Alliance Technology Partners

• Neil Carson, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Fusion-io 
  "NetApp’s open approach to partnering with industry leaders through its Technology Alliance Program will provide customers with efficient solutions that will enable them to achieve performance gains with Fusion-io software and hardware at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. NetApp's innovative approach to Flash with Virtual Storage Tiering, combined with software like Fusion ioTurbine or directCache software and Fusion ioMemory hardware, uniquely enables IT administrators to scale performance on demand in response to ever-changing business requirements.”
• Gary Smerdon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI Corporation 
  "Server side flash-based caching for application acceleration is one of the most exciting and compelling trends in IT today. As a leading provider of server-based acceleration solutions with our extensive Nytro™ product portfolio of PCIe flash card solutions, LSI is pleased to be working with NetApp and their Flash Accel server caching software to deliver dramatic application acceleration improvements for customers’ data-intensive workloads and mission-critical datacenter applications.”
• Greg Goetz, Vice President and General Manager, SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions
  "Collaborating with NetApp allows us to work together to provide Flash memory–based solutions that optimize storage performance and address the problem of I/O latency in the server. Combining NetApp products and our FlashSoft software will deliver significant improvements in application performance and VM density.”
• Ali Zadeh, Corporate Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager, STEC, Inc. 
  "STEC, like NetApp, is committed to delivering intelligent, efficient, high-performance hardware and software solutions to the enterprise storage market. Our SSD-caching software extends this commitment by fully supporting NetApp’s Virtual Storage Tiering and server-caching initiatives which will enable greater cohesion between virtualized enterprise storage systems and host-based applications. As a member of the Alliance Partner Program, STEC looks forward to further advancing SSD technology in NetApp environments and accelerating enterprise storage across an ever-increasing range of applications.”

Availability
Flash Accel will be available in December 2012. Fusion-io products being resold by NetApp are available now.

Additional Resources

• Watch a video on the benefits of NetApp Flash Accel: www.netapp.com/us/library/videos.html?videoId=1788244667001
• Follow NetApp on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NetApp
• Get the latest on NetApp culture: www.facebook.com/NetAppCulture
• Join NetApp on Facebook: www.facebook.com/NetApp
• View NetApp videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/NetAppTV
• Connect with NetApp on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=111681

About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that deliver outstanding cost efficiency and accelerate business breakthroughs. Our commitment to living our core values and consistently being recognized as a great place to work around the world are fundamental to our long-term growth and success, as well as the success of our pathway partners and customers. Use of the word "partner” or "partnership” does not imply a legal partnership between NetApp and any other company. Discover our passion for helping companies around the world go further, faster at www.netapp.com.