EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 and Symmetrix V-Max: Basic Differences

June 30th, 2009 Devang Panchigar Leave a comment Go to comments

EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 and Symmetrix V-Max: Basic Differences

In this post we will cover some important aspects / properties / characteristics / differences between the EMC
Symmetrix DMX-4 and EMC Symmetrix V-Max. It seems like a lot of users are searching on blog posts about this
information.

From a high level, I have tried to cover the differences in terms of performance and architecture related to the
directors, engines, cache, drives, etc

It might be a good idea to also run both the DMX-4 and V-max systems through IOmeter to collect some basic
comparisons between the front end and coordinated backend / cache performance data.

Anyways enjoy this post, and possibly look for some more related data in the future post.

EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 EMC Symmetrix V-Max

Called EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 Called EMC Symmetrix V-Max

DMX: Direct Matrix Architecture V-Max: Virtual Matrix Architecture

Max Capacity: 1 PB Raw Storage Max Capacity: 2 PB of Usable Storage

Max Drives: 1900. On RPQ: 2400 max Max Drives: 2400

EFD’s Supported EFD’s Supported

Symmetrix Management Console 6.0 Symmetrix Management Console 7.0

Solutions Enabler 6.0 Solutions Enabler 7.0

EFD: 73GB, 146GB, 200GB, 400GB EFD: 200GB, 400GB

FC Drives: 73GB, 146GB, 300GB, FC Drives: 73GB, 146GB, 300GB, 400GB

400GB, 450GB

SATA II: 500GB, 1000 GB SATA II: 1000 GB

FC Drive Speed: 10K or 15K FC Drive Speed: 15K

SATA II Drive Speed: 7.2K SATA II Drive Speed: 7.2K

Predecessor of DMX-4 is DMX-3 Predecessor of V-Max is DMX-4

DMX-4 management has got a bit
easy compared to the previous
generation Symmetrix
4 Ports per Director
No Engine based concept
24 slots
1 System bay, 9 Storage bays
No engines
64 Fiber Channel total ports on all
directors for host connectivity
32 FICON ports for host connectivity
32 GbE iSCSI ports
Total Cache: 512GB with 256 GB
usable (mirrored)
Drive interface speed either 2GB or
4GB, drives auto negotiate speed
Green color drive LED means 2GB
loop speed, Blue color drive LED
means 4GB loop speed
512 byte style drive (format)
FAST: Fully Automated Storage
Tiering may not be supported on
DMX-4’s (most likely since the support
might come based on a microcode
level rather than a hardware level)
Microcode: 5772 / 5773 runs DMX-4’s
Released in July 2007
Concepts of Directors and Cache on
separate physical slots / cards
DMX-4 Timefinder performance has
been better compared to previous
generation
No IP Management interface into the
Service Processor
Ease of Use with Management – atleast
with SMC 7.0 or so called ECC lite
8 Ports per Director
Engine based concept
The concept of slots is gone
1 System bay, 10 Storage bays
8 Engines in one System (serial number)
128 Fiber Channel total ports on
directors/engines for host connectivity
64 FICON ports for host connectivity
64 GbE iSCSCI ports
Total Cache: 1024 GB with 512 GB usable
(mirrored)
Drive interface speed 4GB
Only 4GB drive speed supported.
520-byte style drive (8 bytes used for
storing data check info). Remember the
clarion drive styles, well the data stored in
both the cases is different. The 8 bytes
used with the Symmetrix V-Max are the
data integrity field based on the algorithm
D10-TIF standard proposal
FAST: Fully Automated Storage Tiering will
be supported later this year on the V-Max
systems
Microcode: 5874 runs V-Max
Released in April 2009
Concept of condensed Director and Cache
on board
300% better TImefinder Performance
compared to DMX-4
IP Management interface to the Service
Processor, can be managed through the
customer’s Network – IP infrastructure
Symmetrix Management Console is Symmetrix Management Console to be
not charged for until (free) DMX-4 licensed at a cost starting the V-Max
systems

Architecture of DMX-4 has been Architecture of V-Max is completely

similar to the architecture of its redesigned with this generation and is
predecessor DMX-3 completely different from the predecessor
DMX-4

Microcode 5772 and 5773 has be build Microcode 5874 has been build on base
on previous generation of microcode 5773 from previous generation DMX-4
5771 and 5772 respectively

No RVA: Raid Virtual Architecture Implementation of RVA: Raid Virtual

Architecture

Largest supported volume is 64GB per Large Volume Support: 240GB per LUN
LUN (Open Systems) and 223GB per LUN
(Mainframe Systems)

128 hypers per Drive (luns per drive) 512 hypers per Drive (luns per drive)

Configuration change not as robust as V-Max systems introduced the concept of

V-Max Systems concurrent configuration change allowing
customers to perform change
management on the V-Max systems
combined to work through single set of
scripts rather than a step based process.

DMX-4 does present some challenges Reduced mirror positions giving customers
with mirror positions good flexibility for migration and other
opportunities

No Virtual Provisioning with RAID 5 Virtual Provisioning allowed now with RAID
and RAID 6 devices 5 and RAID 6 devices

No Autoprovisioning groups Concept of Autoprovisioning groups

introduced with V-Max Systems

Minimum size DMX-4: A single storage Minimum size V-Max SE (single engine)
cabinet system, supporting 240 drives system can be purchased with 1 engine
can be purchased with a system and 360 drive max.
cabinet

No concepts of Engine, architecture Each Engine consists of 4 Quad Core Intel

based on slots Chips with either 32GB, 64GB or 128GB
cache on each engine with 16 front-end
ports with each engine. Backend ports per
engine is 4 ports connecting System bay
to storage bay

Power PC chips used on directors Intel Quad Core chips used on Engines

Powerpath VE support for Vsphere – Powerpath VE supported for Vsphere –

Virtual machines for DMX-4 Virtual machines for V-Max

Concept of Backplane exists with this V-Max fits in the category of Modular
generation of storage Storage and eliminates the bottle neck of
a backplane

DMX-4 was truly sold as a generation V-Max systems have been sold with a big
upgrade to DMX-3 marketing buzz around hundreds of

Systems cannot be federated
Directors are connected to the system
through a legacy backplane (DMX –
Direct Matrix Architecture).
No support for FCOE or 10GB Ethernet
No support for 8GB loop interface
speeds
Strong Marketing with DMX-4 and
good success
No support for InfiniBand expected
with DMX-4
No Federation
Global Cache on Global Memory
Directors
DMX-4 is a monster storage system
256GB total vault on DMX-4 systems
Performance on DMX-4 has been
great compared to its previous
generation DMX, DMX2, DMX-3
V-Max performs better compared to
engines, millions of IOPs, TB’s of cache,
Virtual Storage
The concept of Federation has been
introduced with V-Max systems, but
systems are not federated in production or
customer environments yet
Engines are connected through copper
RAPID IO interconnect at 2.5GB speed
No support for FCOE or 10GB Ethernet
No support for 8GB loop interface speeds
Virtual Marketing for Virtual Matrix (V-
Max) since the product was introduced
with FAST as a sales strategy with FAST
not available for at least until the later
part of the year.
Would InfiniBand be supported in the
future to connect engines at a short or
long distance (several meters)
With Federation expected in the upcoming
versions of V-Max, how would the cache
latency play a role if you had federation
between systems that are 10 to 10 meters
away?
Global Cache on local engines chips: again
as cache is shared between multiple
engines, cache latency is expected as
multiple engines request this IO
The V-Max building blocks (engines) can
create a much larger storage monster
200GB of vault space per Engine, with 8
engines, we are looking at 1.6TB of vault
storage
IOPS per PORT of V-Max Systems
128 MB/s Hits
385 Read
385 Write
IOPS for 2 PORT of V-Max Systems
128MB/s Hits
635 Read
640 Write
2.2 x Performance on FICON compared to
DMX-4 FICON
Large Metadata overhead with the
amount of volumes, devices, cache
slots, etc, etc
SRDF Technology Supported
Symmetrix Management Console 6.0
supported, no templates and wizards
Total SRDF Groups supported 128
16 Groups on Single Port for SRDF
V-Max comparison on Connectivity
V-Max comparison on Usability
(Storage)
DMX-4 was the first version of
Symmetrix where RAID6 support was
rolled out
RAID6 support on DMX-4 is and was a
little premature
SATA II performance on DMX-4 is
better than V-Max
SATA II performance on DMX-4 is
better than V-Max
Fiber Channel performance better
compared to DMX and DMX-2’s.
DMX-4 start supporting 4GB interface
host connectivity
RVA not available on DMX-4 platforms
No MIBE and SIB with DMX-4. Rather
the DMX-4 directors are connected
through a common backplane.
Director count goes from Director 1 on
the left to Director 18 (Hex) on the
right
2 Directors failures if not in the same
fabric or bus, rather are not DI’s (Dual
Initiators) of each other will not cause
a system outage or data loss / data
unavailable
Single loop outages will not cause DU
DMX-4 Systems.
2 Ports can have as many as 17000 IOPS
on FICON
A reduction of 50 to 75% overhead with
the V-Max related to metadata
New SRDF/EDP (extended distant
protection)
Diskless R21 passthrough device, no disk
required for this passthrough
Templates and Wizards within the new
SMC 7.0 console
Total SRDF Groups supported 250
64 Groups on Single Port for SRDF
2X Connectivity compared to the DMX-4
3X usability compared to the DMX-4
RAID 6 is 3.6 times better than the DMX-4
RAID 6 on V-Max (performance) is
equivalent to RAID 1 on DMX-4
SATA II drives do not support the 520-
byte style. EMC takes those 8 bytes (520 –
512) of calculation for data integrity T10-
DIF standard proposal and writes it in
blocks or chunks of 64K through out the
entire drive causing performance
degradation.
The performance of SATA II drives on V-
Max is bad the DMX-4 systems
Fiber Channel performance compared to
DMX-4 improved by about 36%
Fiber Channel performance 5000 IOPS per
channel
RVA: Raid Virtual Architecture allows to
have one mirror position for RAID volumes
allowing customers to used the rest of the
3 positions for either BCV’s, SRDF,
Migration, etc, etc.
MIBE: Matrix Interface Board Enclosure
connects the Odd and the Evens or (Fabric
A and Fabric B) Directors together. The
SIB (System Interface Board) connects
these engines together using Rapid IO
Director count goes from 1 on the bottom
to 16 (F) on the top, based on each engine
having 2 directors. 8 Engines, 16
Directors.
Single engine failure (2 Directors) will not
cause Data Loss / Data Unavailable and
the system will not cause an outage.
Failed components can be Directors,
Engines, MIBE, PS’s, Fan, Cache in a
single Engine or 2 directors.
Single loop outages will not cause DU
More architectural details related to drives, cache, directors, cabinets, Mibe, SIB, Service Processor to come in
the V-Max architecture expansion and modularity post over the next week.

Enjoy!!!!

Related posts:

1. EMC Symmetrix V-Max: Supported drive types

2. EMC Symmetrix DMX-4: Supported Drive Types

3. Symmetrix BIN file

4. EMC Symmetrix V-Max: Enginuity 5874

5. Enhancements to EMC Symmetrix V-Max Systems coming!!

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derekpm 8 months ago

• Rather interesting. Has few times re-read for this purpose to remember. Thanks for interesting article.
Waiting for trackback
• Flag
• LikeReplyReply
•
Enki 7 months ago

• Good list of differences!

A couple of clarifications
- V-Max supports 10K drives (400GB available)
- Virtual Provisioning supports Mirrored, RAID 5, & RAID 6 on both DMX and V-Max
 - The small system for DMX (the 950) and the V-Max SE both support 120 drives in one rack with the
option of one additional rack to take them to 360 drives.
• Flag
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•
StorageNerve 7 months ago in reply to Enki

• Hi Enki,

Thanks for pointing to these corrections.

I do remember the limitation with RAID 5 and RAID 6 devices related to Virtual provisioning on 5773? Has
that been changed?

Cheers, @storagenerve
• Flag
• LikeReplyReply

Reactions

storagenerve 1 week ago

From twitter via BackType

• This has been the post with the most number of hits in 2010, what does it say about #EMC #V-Max
http://bit.ly/fNAyE customers migrating to
•

storagenerve 2 weeks ago

From twitter via UberVU

• Believe it or not, this has been the post with the most number of hits in 2010, what does it say about
#EMC #V-Max http://bit.ly/fNAyE
•
lamw 8 months ago

From twitter via UberVU

• RT @hany_michael: very interesting comparison between EMC DMX4 and V-MAX : http://bit.ly/fNAyE
•
hany_michael 8 months ago

From twitter via UberVU

• very interesting comparison between EMC DMX4 and V-MAX : http://bit.ly/fNAyE

•
storagenerve 8 months ago

From twitter via UberVU

• EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 and V-Max: Differences - http://bit.ly/EqV6r

blog comments powered by DISQUS
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storagenerve: RT @rbrambley: @scott_lowe @vseanclark @knieriemen & @3parfarley ,

VIRTUMANIA Episode 3: HA For VMs http://bit.ly/9FezsO <good podcast..
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 10:37:38 AM

storagenerve: my eyes are burning out going through this xml code.....but it has some
great info.....looking forward to deciphering it all soon...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 9:05:04 AM

Kiwi_Si: @mvaughn25 @StorageNerve $50 return policy is a little steep, though I

suppose they'd sell on Ebay quite well if you didn't like it. :)
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mvaughn25: RT @StorageNerve: @Kiwi_Si: @mvaughn25 I'm going cold w/the iPad. >-
likewise -> still tempted 2 leverage 14 day return policy, $50 fee tho
Wednesday, March 17, 2010 3:22:27 AM

storagenerve: yea....it seems like a great idea, i have been exploring for about 3 months
now....though it looks good so far..
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