Data centre market leader EMC just released some boxes which eclipse anything that its rivals have out there. The new EMC VNX range is made up of the systems (VNX5200, VNX5400, VNX5600, VNX5800, VNX7600, VNX8000 and VNX-F). It breaks most of the speed and efficiency records set by its two year old range of products.

The secret sauce is that it has optimised the Intel multi-core chips and configured the flash drives in the box so that they behave like flash rather than super-fast HDD drives.  The upshot of all of this is that the EMC VNX Series can deliver practically twice the speed and performance for a third of the price of the old boxes.

Companies hoping to build a data centre can actually buy a cheaper box and still get a faster speed. Enabled with MCx software, the new VNX Series is designed to address the high-performance, low-latency requirements of virtualized applications, which is the most common use case for midrange solutions. MCx software takes full advantage of the latest Intel-multi core processing technology to optimize flash by distributing all VNX data services across all cores (up to 32).

This is a new approach for midrange arrays—enabling the new VNX to deliver the performance of the previous generation at only one-third the price. With this sort of technology it is hard to see how other data services outfits can even enter the market.