Dell EMC XtremIO X2 V6.2

Blog written by Dan Inbar, SVP, GM, XtremIO, Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies,

When we released XtremIO X2 with XIOS v6.1 at Dell Technologies World 2018, we delivered XtremIO metadata-aware replication – the industry’s most efficient replication across a WAN. Since then our innovation engine has continued chugging along full steam ahead.

Latest release of XtremIO X2 hardware and software (XIOS v6.2) includes many features, but I’d like to focus on the following:

• Cloud-based monitoring

• Enhanced QoS

• Greater flexibility

• Improved ease of use

Cloud-Based Monitoring: We announced at VMworld 2018 that Dell EMC CloudIQ – the Fitness Tracker for Storage – was expanding support to include VMAX, PowerMax, and XtremIO. Well the wait is over.

Click to enlarge

CloudIQ integration is built-into XtremIO X2 v6.2, allowing customers to easily track storage health, predict utilization requirements, and detect anomalies for one or multiple storage systems. It uses machine learning to be able to identify problem areas so you can keep your storage healthy. XtremIO X2, and their other company’s storage environments from any browser or a mobile app targeted to become available end of September.

Management from a single user interface will definitely make life easier for administrators but imagine the value in being able to identify potential risks and expedite resolutions faster!

Customers are going off the rails about these latest enhancements:

“Dell EMC CloudIQ provides the predictive analytics, trending and anomaly detection insight needed to proactively manage our XtremIO X2 storage environment,” said Roberto Hurtado, engineer, storage systems, Christus Health

Great, right? But as we said earlier, we didn’t put on brakes there.

• Enhanced QoS: The demands being placed upon data centers and IT infrastructures today means that it is not enough to just be fast and keep the ‘train on the tracks’, they must also ensure the services they are delivering are of the highest quality possible. It’s about ensuring lower priority services do not take resources away from business critical services. This release is designed to help companies improve the consistency of service performance and uptime while delivering greater QoS that aligns with business priorities. XtremIO X2 v6.2 provides administrators with the ability to control IO/s or bandwidth to better align resource allocation with agreed upon service levels and deliver the highest levels of performance and availability in a consistent manner. IT organizations will be able to limit load on test/dev, repurpose copies to prevent impact on production copies, avoid the ‘Noisy Neighbor’ problem and remove the risk of application hogging in multi-tenant environments.

• Greater flexibility: XtremIO X2 provides data centers with even greater flexibility to expand their storage clusters based upon their business and workloads needs. It not only supports Online Cluster Expansion (OCE), which is completely transparent to both IT applications and users, but also supports flexible scaling options within a single cluster. Now IT organizations will be able to align resources to workload demands and have the flexibility of a ‘pay,-you-grow’ approach to storage capacity planning. We have added support for unbalanced configurations, and the introduction of new larger 3.84TB SSD X-Bricks which are capable of achieving as much as 230TB raw capacity per X-Brick to support larger workload needs.

• Improved ease of use: Who wouldn’t appreciate something designed to help make your job easier? XtremIO has always been extremely easy to manage with zero tuning needed. We already have a HTML5-powered UI that offers enterprise functionality with consumer levl simplicity. On top of these, we are ow further simplifying copy data management within VMware environments. XtremIO X2 with XIOS v6.2 brings tighter integration with AppSync by enabling administrators to execute VMware integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) activities directly from the XtremIO Management System (XMS), rather than having to switch between interfaces. Centralizing the management of iCDM from a single UI simplifies the process of generating and consuming copies within VMware environments making it easier for administrators to meet service requests.

Look at all we have achieved in four short months. There is no better time to start your journey towards transforming and modernizing your storage infrastructure with Dell EMC and XtremIO.

Here are few more things our customers had to say:
“Dell EMC XtremIO continues to evolve and provide the features customers are demanding. XtremIO’s Online Cluster Expansion works flawlessly. We can easily scale the environment without impacting our existing workloads while ensuring we spend our money only where and when needed.” said Bryan Peroutka, technical solutions architect, World Wide Technology, Inc.

“Having VMware level visibility from the XtremIO Management Server allows us to see beyond just storage. Usually storage admins do not have the luxury of seeing in detail what happens to a LUN after it gets provisioned to a host, or the other way around. XtremIO X2 has allowed us to view the entire whole flow between storage and hosts/VMs, making this an invaluable feature,” said Roberto Hurtado, engineer, storage systems, Christus Health

Resources:
XtremIO X2 DS
Video: Dell EMC XtremIO for Virtual Workloads
ESG Lab Review: Dell EMC XtremIO X2: Delivering High Performance and Advanced Functionality for Virtualized Environments