EMC on Monday enhanced its flagship VMAX storage array with support for new processors, a new storage interconnect, mixed drive configurations and updates to its Enginuity operating system.

The enhancements are to the VMAX 10K, the entry-level VMAX array and EMC’s array for small to mid-size enterprises. Two other higher-end VMAX’s that are also part of this family — the VMAX 20K and the VMAX 40K — already support most of these enhancements.

The new VMAX 10K is 90% faster in running Oracle in VMware virtualized environments and contains 50% more processor cores than previous models, according to EMC. It uses 12 Intel 2.8GHz Westmere 6 Core CPUs for performance enhancements and a new Virtual Matrix Interconnect, which is 10% faster than previous models, EMC says. (Previously, the 10K used eight 2.4GHz Westmere CPUs.)

The Virtual Matrix Interconnect, which is common to all VMAX models, allows scaling of system resources by combining VMAX 10K engines. Each 10K engine or controller consists of two directors and redundant interfaces to the Interconnect. The two directors each consolidate front-end, global memory and back-end functions, allowing direct memory access to I/O operations.
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