One new model delivers higher density than had previously been available, and another offers a lower entry price than had previously been the case.

EMC has expanded its all-flash VNX-F lineup, with one new model that delivers higher density than had previously been available, and another that offers a lower entry price than had previously been the case.

The VNX-F family is designed as a supplementary alternative to customers with fairly specific flash needs.

“XtremeIO is EMC’s main flash product,” said Jon Siegal, Engineering Manager at EMC. “VNX-F is designed to round out the all flash portfolio, by addressing that part of the all-flash market that’s looking for low cost enterprise 5 9s reliability, but at a sub $75,000 price point. For customers looking for a more affordable option, and who have workloads that don’t benefit from data reduction services, or who prefer to rely on the host for data reduction services, this is the choice for them. In other cases, it goes into very large companies, but to fit specific workloads and use cases that don’t require data reduction services.” Another key use case is where a resource-intensive application requires its dedicated array, with its own resources with concentrated IOPS/GB

The two new models are the VNX-F5000, which becomes the new lower-end entry, and the VNX-F7000, an extremely dense offering. Both will be available for less than $5/GB (pre-effective capacity before data reduction).

“The F5000 starts at 2.8 TB and goes to 40 TB, while the VNX-F7000 starts at 11 TB and scales up to 172 TB,” Siegal said. “The F7000 has a new 3U enclosure that gives us really good density, with 120 drives in that 3U shelf.”

Both new VNX-F models can be ordered now. However, the F7000’s new 120-drive dense shelf arrays are not available today, but are expected to ship later this year. The 1.6TB drives that will enable the VNX-F7000 to scale up to 172 TB are not available today either, but EMC says they are “coming soon.”

Both new VNX-F models are pre-configured with a single storage pool and RAID 5 protection, expediting time to productivity. These systems are block-only (Fibre Channel, FCoE or iSCSI) and designed for five nines availability. They are managed through the EMC Unisphere Management Suite. Optional add-ons include support for snapshots, replication and controller-based data-at-rest-encryption.