Questions to ask EMC about VPLEX

1. What about Thin Provisioning of Volumes with VPLEX ?2. How many Storage-,
Server-, HBA-Products and OSs are supported ?3. What about Space Efficient
Point-in-time copies ?4. How many installations are there with VPLEX ?5. What
about asynchronous replication with the VPLEX ?6. How about using SSD as a
Performance Cache in the VPLEX director ?
7. Whats up with Invista ? (and all the money i invested into special
SAN equipment ?)
so Incipient is bye bye.. Welcome YottaYotta !8. What about Write performance ?

WHAT IS VPLEX?
We are looking at implementing a storage virtualization device and I started
doing a bitof
research on EMCs product offering. Below is a summary of some of
theinformation
Ive gathered, including a description of what VPLEX does as well assome pros
and cons of implementing it. This is all info
Ive gathered by readingvarious blogs, looking at EMC documentation and
talking to our local EMC reps. I dont have any first-hand experience with VPLEX
yet.
What is VPLEX?
VPLEX
at its core is a storage virtualization appliance. It sits between your arrays and
hostsand virtualizes the presentation of storage arrays, including non-EMC
arrays. Instead ofpresenting storage to the host directly you present it to the
VPLEX. You then configure thatstorage from within the VPLEX and then zone the
VPLEX to the host.
Basically, you attach anystorage to it, and like in-band virtualization devices, it
virtualizes and abstracts them.
There are three VPLEX product offerings, Local, Metro, and Geo:
Local.
VPLEX Local manages multiple heterogeneous arrays from a single interface
within a single data center location. VPLEX Local allows increasedavailability,
simplified management, and improved utilization across multiple arrays.
Metro.
VPLEX Metro with AccessAnywhere enables active-active, block levelaccess to
data between two sites within synchronous distances. Host applicationstability
needs to be considered. It is recommended that depending on the
applicationthat consideration for Metro be =< 5ms latency. The combination of

virtual storagewith VPLEX Metro and virtual servers allows for the transparent
movement of
VMs
and storage across longer distances and improves utilization across
heterogeneousarrays and multiple sites.
Geo.
VPLEX Geo with AccessAnywhere enables active-active, block level access to
databetween two sites within asynchronous distances. Geo improves the cost
efficiency ofresources and power
It provides the same distributed device flexibility as Metro but extends the
distance up to 50ms of network latency.
What are some advantages of using VPLEX?
1. Extra Cache and Increased IO.
VPLEX has a large cache (64GB per node) thatsits in-between the host and the
array. It offers additional read cache that cangreatly improve read performance
on databases because the additional cache isoffloaded from the individual
arrays.
2. Enhanced options for DR with RecoverPoint.
The DR benefits are increasedwhen integrating RecoverPoint with VPLEX Metro
or Geo to replicate the data using real time replication . It includes a capacity
based journal for very granularrollback capabilities (think of it as a DVR for the
data center). You can also use thenative bandwidth reduction features
(compression & deduplication) or disable them ifyou have WAN optimization
devices installed like those from Riverbed.