MEETING THE INFORMATION-SHARING CHALLENGE

Performance bottlenecks, security issues, and the high cost of data protection and management associated with deploying file servers using general-purpose operating systems become non-issues with the EMC® VNX® Series Gateway. Each VNX Series Gateway product—the VG2 or VG8—is a dedicated network server optimized for file access and advanced functionality in a scalable, easy-to-use package. The world’s number-one trusted storage platform found in best-in-class EMC Symmetrix®, the EMC VNX series, and EMC CLARiiON® back-end array technologies, combined with the VNX series impressive I/O system architecture, deliver industry-leading availability, scalability, performance, and ease of management to your business.

The VNX series follows a modular unified approach with separate block storage processors of varying capacities and performance, scalable X-Blades, and single or dual Control Stations across the series. This flexibility enables customers to scale block storage pool processors and file system processors independently to meet their unique business needs. Utilizing this architecture, the VNX Series Gateway delivers high-performance file system access.

VNX Series Gateway platforms extend the value of existing EMC storage array technologies, delivering a comprehensive, consolidated storage solution that adds IP storage (NAS and iSCSI) in a centrally managed information storage system, enabling you to dynamically grow, share, and cost-effectively manage file systems with multi-protocol file access.Take advantage of simultaneous support for NFS (including NFSv4.1 with pNFS support) and CIFS protocols by letting UNIX and Microsoft Windows clients share files using the VNX Operating Environment for File sophisticated file-locking mechanisms.

The high-end features offered with the VNX Series Gateway platform enable entry-level data center consolidation resulting in lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of your server and storage assets—while enabling you to grow your IP storage environment into the hundreds of terabytes from a single point of management. You can also improve performance over standard NAS by enabling pNFS for your NFS requirements; or simply add VNX Multi-Path File System (MPFS) to your environment for your NFS and CIFS requirements without application modification.

UNEQUALED AVAILABILITY FEATURES

The VNX Series Gateway platforms provide flexible availability configurations with the option of non-stop file access achieved through transparent, dynamic failover to a hot standby X-Blade. Depending on your operational needs, you can deploy in several operating modes including primary/standby or primary/primary for the VG2, or advanced N+1 or N+M failover for the VG8 (where N is the number of active X-Blades and M is the number of X-Blades in the standby pool).Primary/standby is designed for environments that cannot tolerate any system downtime due to a hardware failure. In this mode, one of the X-Blades operates in standby mode while the primary one manages all of the data movement between the network and storage.

For the VG8, one or more X-Blades can be configured as standby (N+M advanced failover model) for the active blades, providing a pool of blades for the highest levels of availability. The standby blade(s) seamlessly take over the operation of any failing blade, delivering equal performance to the primary system after a failover, thus allowing the system to fully scale without concern for managing potential resource constraints in the event of a failover.In the event of an X-Blade failover, VNX Operating Environment for File uses a metadata logging facility to recover. The advanced failover capabilities allow the hot spare to take over the full workload, running at the same performance and service levels as before the failure.

For information protection, VNX Series Gateway systems offer EMC SnapSure™ software for creating read-only/read-write snaps of file systems. The snapshot can be used for online backups as well as for quick recovery of deleted files. With the addition of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Client Services integration, this capability is taken a step further, enabling the end user to leverage the functionality in Windows clients to recover deleted files directly from the Windows Explorer user interface.For an even higher degree of information protection, EMC VNX Replicator asynchronously creates a point-in-time copy of a production file system on either a local or geographically remote VNX series system. Replicator provides multi-site protection, simplifies administration with easy-to-define business policies—including recovery point objectives (RPOs)—and uses standard IP-based networks for maintaining consistent replicas between the two sites.

The dedicated, hardware-based RAID controllers in Symmetrix, VNX series, and/or CLARiiON mean that there is minimal performance degradation during a rebuild. The VNX Series Gateway platform defines enterprise-level high availability delivered with X-Blade failover, hardware RAID protection, non-disruptive component replacement, storage processor battery backup, and advanced volume management.Native LUN replication in the form of EMC MirrorView™/S with VNX series/CLARiiON or SRDF®/S with Symmetrix is also supported for your most critical data requiring zero-data-loss availability in the event of a disaster.