eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
LAS VEGAS—EMC, which first introduced generic NAND flash media as an option into enterprise storage arrays in 2008, was able to skip an architectural redesign when it acquired startup XtremIO for $425 million in May 2012. That saved a lot of time and capital.
But it took some corporate patience for the new addition to fit into EMC’s culture and performance expectations. After about 18 months of solving a series of usability and integration problems, most of the bugs were finally worked out.
Development continued, and now XtremIO has become one of the gems of the EMC storage lineup. In fact, since its introduction, XtremIO has been the fastest-selling product in EMC history and, according to IDC, the top-selling all-flash storage array overall.
Enables Large Clusters
On May 4 at EMC World 2015 here, the storage and data protection conglomerate unveiled XtremIO 4.0, which it playfully dubbed “The Beast.” The name emanates from increased data-movement power, capacity of the X-Brick block nodes—with each having a capacity of 40TB—and the fact that XtremIO scales out to just about as many nodes as one can afford.
XtremIO is a scale-out, all-flash clustered storage system for storing primary data from several sources that include dedicated servers, databases and virtualized environments. With workloads becoming larger by the week, faster processing is a highly sought-after commodity.
XtremIO’s secret sauce is in the way it solves the architectural complexities that come with an all-flash scale-out storage system. The use of flash at scale poses a complex problem set that is not suited to traditional storage architectures, and XtremIO allowed EMC to skip an architectural redesign.
Version 4.0 provides significant multiples of performance compared with XtremIO’s previous generation. The new 40TB X-Brick building blocks double the density of v3.0. It also provides up to 33 percent faster performance and supports multi-petabyte configurations over the already quick XtremIO v3.0 system.
The company is offering configurations of up to eight X-Bricks with nondisruptive performance and capacity expansions with 16-way active controllers.
Runs Any Type of Cloud
XtremIO 4.0 also includes enhanced support for hybrid cloud and private cloud storage services that it says allows scale-out storage consolidation across all workloads. Free software updates to existing XtremIO customers help them boost their workloads, consolidation and performance.
XtremIO supports scale-out replication based on best-of-breed EMC RecoverPoint software. Data on XtremIO arrays can be replicated to any array supported by RecoverPoint. The replication delivers up to one-minute recovery point objectives, even when replicating at data center scale with flash-array levels of workload and data change rates.
XtremIO 4.0 also features in-memory copy services, enabling entire workflows to be streamlined and automated from the storage through the hypervisor and into the application.
For more information, go here.