You’re Going to Hear a Lot Next Year From This Product

Corrections are underlined.

You probably don’t know too much about XtremIO Ltd., a Cupertino, CA- and Herzelyia, Israel-based start-up in stealth mode that was acquired by EMC for $430 million in April 2012, but you are going to hear a lot about it next year for several reasons.

First look at its background. It was founded in 2009 by Ehud Rokach, Shuki Bruck, Yaron Segev and Shahar Frank. There was also at a time Aryeh Mergi, former EVP of business development at M-Systems, and also Erez Webman who left last October after working for NetApp, Topio and IBM Haifa Research Lab to found another promising start-up, ScaleIO, where he is CTO.

CEO Rokach is the former CEO of Corrigent Systems, a carrier Ethernet switching provider. Chairman Bruck is the founder of Rainfinity, acquired by EMC. VP R&D Segev was VP of development of Voltaire. Chief scientist Frank was at Redhat, Voltaire, Exanet, IBM and Pillar Data.

In the team are also CTO Robin Ren (VMware, EMC), VP marketing and product management Josh Goldstein (Cirtas, DDN) and VP of US sales Chris Lehman (Exagrid, BluArc) and VP international b’ss devt and Dani Naor (StorAge Networking Technologies acquired by LSI).

XtremIO got a total of $25 million in financial funding including $19 million in 2009.

Goldstein first presented the technology at EMC World on May 19. At last EMC Forum in Paris, France, on November 15, there was a private room where XtremIO, including one of its founders, presenting their technology to potential customers and other people. We were not invited, tried to enter but were mildly dispelled. Nevertheless we met a guy that prefers – of course – not to be cited and gave us many information about the future product. But note we cannot guarantee the veracity of what we got and will verify the facts and figures when the device will be officially announced.

XtremIO has designed a stand-alone all-SSD storage system. It’s not the first company in this field. Other ones include Astute Networks, Enmotus, GreenBytes, GridIron Systems, Huawei, Kaminario, NexGen Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, Pure Storage, SolidFire, Texas Memory Systems/IBM, Tintri, Violin Memory, Virident Systems and WhipTail Technologies.

On its side, EMC was pioneering SSDs into its storage arrays, but as replacement of HDDs (EMC FAST) or as server cache (EMC VFcache) not into a system really optimized for the flash memories. In 2011, EMC shipped to customers over 24PBs of flash drive capacity.

XtremIO has a totally new architecture for much better performances. It’s a stand-alone array that cannot be connected with another EMC storage products for applications needing extremely fast response and transfer rate, especially for VDI deployments (VAAI compliant) and databases. The company wrote its MLC flash data protection is better than RAID-6 and event better than RAID-1 (mirroring)with a technology tolerating multiple simultaneous SSD failures.

A key point is that all data are de-duped natively in real time and integrated into the box before being stored on SSDs. Consequently the price per gigabyte could theoretically approach the cost of HDDs – even if its largely depends of the type of data. The reality could be different as our source spoke about $160,000 for one X-Brick at a raw capacity of 10TB and user capacity of 7TB without de-dupe. The de-dupe ratio is around 3:1 on average and 7:1 in VDI environment. In the best case (7:1), it corresponds to $3,7 per gigabyte.

(Updated picture on December 6, 2012)

X-Brick is a 6U building block or a node with SSDs, dual storage processors, redundant power and cooling, no single point of failure. Controller needs 1U, array enclosure 2U, battery backup unit 1U and Infiniband switch 2U. Everything is hot-swappable. It currently uses two multi-core Intel Westmeres (6 cores each) per controller, for a total of 24 cores across four processors per block. All is based on 4K blocks and managed by XIOS, the name of the innovative XtremIO’s operating system.

XtremIO is announcing 100% read random 4K 250,000 IO/s and 100,000 IO/s for write without de-dupe for its one X-Brick with an average latency of 0.5ms (50% read, 50% write, random 4K). There are 4 x 8Gb FC and 4 x 10GbE iSCSI host ports. Power consumption is 1,150W.

It doesn’t use spare drives but automatically reconstructs data from a failed SSD into free space in the array as it keeps the writes redundant through proprietary adaptive data protection technology. Then you can replace the failed unit by another one being re-integrated into the system without intervention.

Another key characteristic is the possibility to scale-out by connecting up to eight X-Bricks connected by Infiniband interfaces. And more you add nodes, better are the performances.

Our source said that the product will be in general availability next February and will be support by EMC in April-May 2013.

Yesterday, in an interview, Chuck Hollis, Global Marketing CTO, EMC, confirmed that "you’ll see all-flash array in first half of 2013 as general product." But on his blog, he later changed his mind: "This is now more likely early 2H2013 I am told"