EMC XtremIO 3.0 Software Adds New Inline Data Services

EMC Corporation announced new features and configurations, ecosystem integrations, and business programs for its XtremIO all-flash arrays.

Collectively, these offer more scale, more capabilities, and more support for consolidated, virtualized, and performance-hungry workloads.

Having already surpassed $100 million in demand within six-months of product availability, EMC believes XtremIO is the fastest-growing all-flash array, and the fastest-growing storage array in history.

New XtremIO 3.0 capabilities deliver enterprise data centers with leaps forward in performance, consolidation, and application agility through intelligent always-on, inline data services. These free software upgrades, available for existing XtremIO arrays, improve IT agility and deliver user experience and economics.

The XtremIO value proposition is: Advanced always-on, inline data services are critical to enabling superior economics, usability, capabilities, and consistent and predictable high performance regardless of workload – it’s an architectural must-have for all-flash arrays. XtremIO set the benchmark for consistent and predictable performance, and now, with these enhancements, delivers new levels of value through a metadata space-efficient snapshot capability, improved capacity efficiency, and additional rich data services that make enterprise data centers simpler and more agile. The software-centric XtremIO architecture offers new capabilities through a simple code upgrade.

Technology Highlights

New entry-level configuration called the Starter X-Brick. Available, this offers the performance and data services of a standard XtremIO array in a low-cost 5TB configuration, with online non-disruptive capacity expansion to a 10TB X-Brick. Customers add more SSDs when they want to expand capacity.
New, larger scale-out clusters up to six X-Bricks. For consolidated workloads, the arrays now support up to six 20TB X-Bricks with 12 active controllers, enabling a 50% IO/s performance increase and 50% more capacity, while maintaining XtremIO’s sub-millisecond latency (orderable this quarter).
Writeable snapshot technology space-efficient for both data and metadata. Available, snapshots are free from limitations of performance, features, topology, or capacity reservations. With their in-memory metadata architecture, the arrays now instantly create entire application development and test environments where every engineer gets a personal sandbox, enable high-performance analytics and reporting copies without any brute force data movement, and deliver near-CDP capabilities for data protection. In addition, the arrays now effectively serve petabytes of capacity from a small and cost effective physical flash footprint.
New inline compression. Available this quarter, XtremIO arrays deliver up to 4X their previous usable capacity through 100% inline compression. A six X-Brick cluster now effectively delivers petabyte-scale flash so efficiently that flash becomes viable and cost-effective in places never before thought possible. XtremIO clusters with 90TB of usable flash capacity now support 540TB of effective capacity at typical 6:1 data reduction (inline deduplication plus inline compression) ratios. When combined with XtremIO’s snapshot capabilities, XtremIO now supports petabytes of functional application data.
New inline Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE). Available, the arrays securely encrypt all data stored on the all-flash array, delivering protection for regulated use cases in sensitive industries such as healthcare, finance, and the government.
Substantial performance improvements for databases, bandwidth-hungry workloads, and VM cloning operations. Available this quarter on all existing arrays, the latest software delivers optimizations that increase real-world application performance. Now OLTP databases run nearly 1.5X faster, data warehouses achieve nearly 2X better throughput, and cloning VMs takes half the time.
More support for EMC software, storage, converged infrastructure solutions, as well as OpenStack deployments. XtremIO supports EMC ViPR SRM Suite (available), ViPR software-defined storage platform (available this quarter) and VSPEX (available this quarter), complementing existing integration with VPLEX, PowerPath, VCE Vblock Systems, VMware VAAI, and vSphere plug-ins. XtremIO is supported (available this quarter) as Cinder block storage in OpenStack clouds.

The combination of XtremIO’s scale-out architecture, data services, and flash endurance help redefine the traditional storage lifecycle and its TCO. A new XtremIO Xpect More Program is now available, designed to make it easier to deploy XtremIO with a long-term, predictable TCO.

This promotion offers customers three benefits:

Maintenance price protection: For up to 7-years, annual support pricing will not increase from its initial price. This allows EMC to provide a low TCO over the full lifecycle of the arrays.
Investment protection: Offers a 3-year money-back warranty if XtremIO does not meet its specifications and other remediation isn’t sufficient.
Flash endurance protection: EMC will replace any SSDs should they reach 95% of their endurance limit within the period of the customer’s support contract. XtremIO is confident that customers never need to worry about flash endurance because of the architecture’s write-efficiencies and its enterprise-grade MLC flash.

The Xpect More Program complements the existing XtremIO ‘$1 Million Inline All the Time Guarantee’ – which has yet to be claimed – and the EMC Flash Rescue Program, a trade-in program that makes it simple for customers to trade-in alternative flash arrays that have not lived up to expectations due to system-level garbage collection, poor usable capacity, and other performance issues.

All XtremIO 2.4 capabilities (Starter X-Brick, inline encryption, writeable snapshots) are available (and began shipping in May 2014), and XtremIO 3.0 capabilities (inline compression, performance improvements) are expected to ship this quarter. All available products are also available from the online EMC Store, which offers an additional resource for customers to research EMC products, compare features, review list prices, and request quotes.

David Vellante, chief research officer, The Wikibon Project, said: “The impact of flash storage will go far beyond performance. 10X performance improvements relative to HDD are really just table stakes. The disruptive opportunities with flash storage are in delivering a new breed of applications supported by advanced data services that were not even possible on disk. These capabilities will dramatically simplify complex application environments, streamline cumbersome workflows and unlock a step function in new business value.”

Craig Englund, Principal Architect, Boston Scientific, said: “Last year we began to redefine our data center with XtremIO for our global VDI deployment and the results have been nothing short of amazing. Today we’ve expanded our use of XtremIO to include our virtual server environment running SQL Server databases and the results have exceeded our expectations. For example, we took a key database from physical to virtual, ran it on fewer cores, and saw performance increase by 300% instantly – just by moving it to XtremIO. The time our DBAs have gained back from trying to tune the database and SQL code, combined with the faster time-to-results on our large queries has an almost incalculable business value. EMC’s pace of innovation is simply breathtaking.”

CJ Desai, president, EMC emerging technology products division, said: “XtremIO heralds a new era in storage array design, architected from the ground-up for consistent and predictable random access performance. With the addition of rich new inline data services, the value XtremIO delivers to customers, which vaulted EMC to #1 in the all-flash array market a mere six weeks after availability, is greatly extended. With better performance, more capacity, more capabilities, and further integration across the EMC product portfolio, XtremIO is the all-flash array platform of choice, helping end-users redefine what’s possible in their data centers and application environments.”