EMC Ships XtremIO All-Flash Array to Select Customers

EMC Corporation announced its Xtrem family of flash-optimized server and storage products and introduced a new line of XtremSF PCIe-based flash cards that accelerate application performance.

XtremSF is server flash hardware, available in a set of eMLC and SLC capacities. It can be deployed as either DAS that sits within the server to deliver high performance – or it can be deployed in combination with XtremSW Cache (formerly EMC VFCache) server caching software to turbocharge network storage array performance while maintaining the level of protection required by mission-critical application environments.

XtremSF joins EMC’s portfolio of performance flash products, which include flash optimized hybrid storage arrays – Isilon, VMAX and VNX, as well as the XtremIO (formerly Project X) all-flash scale-out enterprise storage array.

      
XtremIO

EMC also announced the release of XtremIO to select customers. It is purpose built to leverage flash and deliver new levels of real-world performance, administrative ease, and advanced data services. Its scale-out architecture delivers higher levels of ‘functional IOPS’ to applications that require high levels of random I/O performance, such as OLTP databases, server virtualization and VDI. Functional IOPS are measured under the real-world operating conditions found in today’s demanding production environments with all data services enabled and operating while filled nearly to capacity.

In these real-world conditions, the XtremIO system exceeds 150K functional 4K mixed read/write IOPS, and 250K functional 4K read IOPS for each ‘X-Brick’ (the scale-out building blocks for the XtremIO array), and over 1.2 million functional 4K mixed read/write IOPS, and 2 million functional 4K read IOPS when scaled out to a cluster of eight X-Bricks. The array delivers this level of performance with sub-millisecond response times while running a set of integrated and flash-optimized data services including flash-specific data protection, thin provisioning, global inline data reduction, accelerated VMware provisioning through VAAI, and writeable snapshots.

The XtremSF family of server-based PCIe flash cards
deliver customers with:

• Performance: The devices are proven to deliver a record 1.13 million IOPS in a standard form factor-an achievement unmatched in the industry. They deliver 2X higher throughput than other offerings in the market to enhance real-world workloads in Web scale and other applications.
• Flexibility: The device is available in a range of eMLC (550GB and 2.2TB) and SLC (350GB and 700GB) capacities. In addition, when deployed with XtremSW Cache intelligent server flash caching software, the devices can be leveraged as a caching device for accelerated performance with array protection for applications such as Oracle, SQL and Exchange.
• Efficiency: The devices deliver customers low TCO-up-to 58% better TCO than other offerings. All XtremSF products, including the 2.2TB offering, are standard half-height, half-length 25w PCIe cards-providing high storage capacity in a small footprint for performance, density, and low power consumption-reducing CPU utilization by up-to 50%.

EMC Flash Software Strategy
In 2012, EMC delivered XtremSW cache (formerly VFCache). This was the first step in EMC’s server flash strategy, delivering a server-side storage product featuring a combination of software running on SLC-based PCIe flash devices. This software turned the server flash DAS into a cache, enhancing the performance of a variety of mission-critical transactional and decision support applications. With this announcement, XtremSW cache can now run with eMLC and SLC XtremSF flash cards.

In the future, EMC will deliver a device-independent flash software suite-the EMC XtremSW Suite. This suite will deliver more caching capabilities, in addition to offering advanced data services to flash as memory and flash as DAS. It will provide customers with capabilities such as pooling, cache coherency, deeper storage array integration and specific enhancements for VMware environments in the future.

Availability and Services
XtremSF 550GB and 2.2TB eMLC capacities are available. EMC expects to make 700GB and 1.4TB capacities available on price lists in the second quarter of 2013. EMC will extend the XtremSF family with higher capacity offerings in the future.

EMC Global Services enables customers to accelerate their XtremSF and XtremSW Cache infrastructure deployments. Leveraging EMC’s assessment and implementation, customers can identify the server-centric applications and workloads that will most benefit from EMC flash, and create XtremSF and XtremSW Cache deployment strategies that deliver performance benefit and return for their environment.

Jake Bogie, VP IT, SureSource LLC, said: "SureSource operates independent online stores for some of the world’s most recognized brands-including Hershey’s, Budweiser, and Coca Cola. Performance is an absolute requirement for us. Today, we use XtremSW Cache with XtremSF SLC cards with our VNX unified storage to accelerate our mission-critical Microsoft SQL Server application. The performance is astonishing, enabling us to deliver premier customer service. We’ve seen average overall performance increases of 385% in our annual physical inventory process, 420% in our month-end accounting closure process, and 225% in daily processes. We also recently began testing the new XtremSF MLC cards in our mySQL environment. The read and write IOPS and latencies are incredible under such an intensive workload. The outstanding performance metrics we have achieved from EMC’s server Flash technologies reinforces our decision to build out an all-EMC IT infrastructure in the coming years."

Brian Dougherty, chief data warehouse architect, CMA, said: "At CMA, our mainline businesses are highly dependent on exemplary performance and reliability from our Oracle data warehouse environments. Using XtremIO we are able to engineer our Oracle RAC systems to be faster, more scalable, and handle more concurrent users, while at the same time requiring only 20% of the previous footprint in our data center. We’ve identified immediate storage cost savings of nearly $500K by leveraging XtremIO and will achieve similar savings by reducing our Oracle CPU core license requirements since XtremIO nearly eliminates I/O wait time. But perhaps the best part is the simplicity of the XtremIO system. It was installed and running in a couple of hours and is very easy to configure and manage."

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Single point flash solutions are an archaic approach to thinking about deploying flash.  In order to drive real benefit across virtualized infrastructure where workloads are dynamic, users need to consider flash that is just as dynamic. That means no point-only solutions. Instead, users need to think about a portfolio-approach to flash-in the server, in the array, or as an all-flash array-using intelligent software to leverage those assets. EMC has had this philosophy since it first entered the flash game, and hasn’t wavered."

Zahid Hussain, SVP and GM, EMC flash products division, said: "Flash technology is enabling new levels of application performance and is the single biggest consideration to how customers are architecting their data centers today. Today, we are delivering a market-leading and comprehensive portfolio of flash solutions across a variety of customer use cases and requirements. Going forward, we are dedicated to providing increased value through flash-optimized software and systems to break the barriers of today’s infrastructure silos."