EMC Storage and Pricing Information

[tacticsbaby]

Greetings,

We are currently evaluating EMC VNX storage for our organizations View project. Through testing we found the VNX the be a great performer for VDI. We have decided to go with VNX and we are looking at a rather large price, almost 300K. Long story short I would like to know what components and features we can do without so we can reduce our cost if possible while maitaining a high level of performance. Thanks in advance.

[gunnarb]

Talk to your View Architect.  If you are about to spend 300k on a VNX you should have 10k to bring in an Architect for a week and have them help you with this purchasing decision.  In the end it could potentially either save you money on your purchase, or save you face in making sure what you purchase is going to do what the Architect says it needs to do.  Removing or Adding features should be a decision for the person designing this system, your environment is unique, your decisions will also be unique, have an expert help you make those decisions.

VNX is a good call btw.

Gunnar

[amandasmith]

Hi,

  Check the following information http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/emc.html

Hope this information helps you.

Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else

[mittim12]

I agree with Gunnar on this subject.   If you are spending that much then you should go ahead and spend some extra on a consultant to assist.  If you start removing components and features then you are going to invalidate the testing you have already performed with the VNX. 

To be honest I wish we had spent the extra money for a consultant when we started playing around with VDI.   Granted this was 3 or 4 years ago but it may have saved me a lot of heartache.  

[gunnarb]

I agree with Amanda Smith.  Those posts are always so extermly helpful.

[mittim12]

Are you trying to pad your post count?    :smileyshocked:

[gunnarb]

Ha, no, trying to get attention to this poster who hardly ever posts anything of value.

[asrinivas]

Ready Andrei's post on EMC storage and VDI at http://myvirtualcloud.net/?p=2604

There is no need for you to spend so much money esp if you can look to use Atlantis computing like solution with SAS drives.

Disclaimer: I am a Atlantis employee!

[ebernard]

As asrinivas said and others, there are many ways to reduce the final bill, SSD is the answer.

But first of all, do you have an idea of what you REALLY need for your VDI infrastructure ?

The gold rule on VDI is storage, and more precisely IOPS and user profiles.

So, on Andre website, (EMC colleague), you can find a View Calculator that helps you to estimate the global amount of IOPS required, after a quick assessment on your existing users on physical PCs.

If you don't have a real assessment on current needs, we generally assume between 12 and 20 IOPS per Desktop VM depending on OS, optimization, user profile and apps, in stateless mode.

You must size the storage to handle this stateless state but also the peak relative to bootstorms, A/V sessions, etc....

So, to come back on EMC, feel free to ask to your local EMC contact to be in touch with a vSpecialist fellow to estimate real needs. Moreover, there are flash technologies into VNX arrays that help reduce number of spindles by delivering huge IOPS and using Cache technologies, both in read and write, useful in VDI, because of temp files, swap...

Other features are probably relative to protection (replication, snaps, etc...), you're free to decide what are your needs about it.

Don't hesitate to give feedback or ask more questions, hope this helps and don't forget to score answers.

Emmanuel