But can you hook a Clariion to it???

El Reg has a quick overview of the upgrades to EMC's Symmetrix VMAX.  Some of it is good stuff:

The Fibre Channel upgrade doubles link speed from 4 to 8Gbit/s and EMC has also announced 8Gbit/s mainframe FICON links and 8Gbit/s SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility). It has added support for the mainframe zHPF (z mainframe High Performance FICON) protocol which EMC says streamlines the FICON architecture to reduce I/O overhead and improve mainframe performance.

The 8gig ports for remote replication are more of an upgrade incentive than an enticement to convert, but that makes it harder for the competition to steal EMC customers.

(more after the jump)

What I didn't realize is that the VMAX didn't have decent thin provisioning when it came out in April:

There are new replication facilities: by using EMC's TimeFinder/Clone Software, customers can have "thick to thin" cloning on Symmetrix V-Max. This form of replication copies only written data tracks from standard volumes to smaller thinly-provisioned volumes. Zero space reclamation can be applied to the clones to recover all-zero data blocks. Thin volumes can also be replicated to standard volumes, extending their mobility into and out of thin pools.

This has been around now for two years on Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning.  The standard line from EMC supporters on such things is that it doesn't matter who is first once a heavy hitter like EMC is in the race.  In this case, however, it makes a huge difference.  The book on thin provisioning is far from complete, and HDS is several chapters ahead in writing theirs.

Still, a lot of this boils down to the question in the title.  For all the new features, the VMAX is still a stand-alone unit.  The customer who has invested millions in Clariion or other midrange storage is still stuck with two totally separate tiers.  EMC's solution is to offer the user SATA drives at a cheap price for the VMAX, suggesting you make boat anchors out of your Clariions.