Originating Author: David Floyer
The new EMC CX4 functionality enhancements are probably the most comprehensive ever seen in a refresh of a midrange platform. While EMC's DMX can generally support more simultaneous applications, scales better than CX and typically will offer higher service levels, virtually all the functionality of the DMX platform has been included in CX, including flash drives, thin provisioning, five 9's availability and spin-down. There is now a strong overlap between the high-end of the CX and the low end of the DMX line. The differences have become significantly smaller with this latest CX announcement and there are many areas (such as environmentals and I/O flexibility) where the CX platform perhaps even eclipses DMX. The question customers must now clearly address is "where are the increased costs of DMX hardware and software still justified?"
The Wikibon community sees four areas that will remain the ROI stronghold for the DMX (and competitive platforms-- e.g. Hitachi's USPV):
- Mainframe: DMX supports the IBM zSeries with ESCON and FICON. The CLARiiON does not support mainframes;
- Applications with very high IOPS requirements which are large, cache friendly and where predictable response time is a business imperative. These are mainly home-grown, monolithic database applications, often running on mainframes and high end Unix platforms. The CLARiiON has a dual-controller architecture and is restricted to 32GB of cache, while the DMX has a multi-controller architecture and can manage 256GB with more sophisticated cache management tools. For smaller applications, customers may find it more cost effective to use multiple CX or other midrange systems-- certainly this will be true from an acquisition cost perspective;
- Applications that need three-node, zero RPO solutions only provided by SRDF and competing products. These are often very high availability financial applications. The integration of RecoverPoint into FLARE and other synchronous and asynchronous solutions give a wide choice of high-availability and disaster recovery options for CX and will generally meet the RPO and RTO requirements of most applications;
- Customers with well-established applications exploiting DMX storage management features, where the risk of migration and testing on other platforms is too high or the value low compared with other priorities.
Consolidation of smaller arrays is perhaps another area users should consider for DMX. However the availability of very large configurations from competing vendors, the advanced functionality of the CX and the continued dramatic reductions in hardware and software costs mean that consolidation onto a large DMX will be increasingly harder to justify, especially when future migration costs from DMX are factored.
Action Item: Platforms such as EMC's DMX and Hitachi's USPV have become the mainframes of storage arrays. They will operate very well for a number of years, service the most demanding applications indefinitely and offer the lowest risk for mission critical applications. While there is no immediate rush to migrate from these platforms, for most organizations it is time for storage executives to ensure that only applications that meet clear ROI criteria are running on these environments. IT organizations should put a tiered storage strategy in place where business units must justify tier-1A placement-- all other applications should default to storage with lower acquisition, software and maintenance costs. This strategy will reduce costs and avoid potentially onerous migration expenses down the road.
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