Dell XtremIO Reviews

• Speed of operation: We had several SQL databases that pounded EMC CX4-480 and EMC VMAX 20K.
• XtremeIO handles the flow well, running on the controller memory, rather than straight to the drives.

It has offloaded high IOPS processes and cleared the main arrays for bulk work.

Even with the fast SSD drives and processing on the controller, there was still a lag on the FC ports.

The initial node came with only two FC ports per controller. It was used for multiple ports on the VMAX to spread traffic over several VSANs.

For more detail:

I had 4 dH2i powerpath servers hitting it, along with 4 vmware clusters 8 host each, on a X1 brick we only had two controllers both with 2 port
So a total of 4 FC ports.

Compared to the VMAX 20K, where I had 8 ports on vlan 2, 6 ports on vlan 100, 8 ports on vlan 50, so I was able to spread the traffic around between process.
I had 2 directors on one VMAX, whereas I had 3 directors on the other VMAX.

With only 4 ports on the xtremeIO, the most I could do was send traffic on 2 ports to two different VLANS one on each controller.
So my comment was get additional ports, so the DH2I servers don’t hog all the IOPS.

Recommend getting the second brick X2 and the matrix switch, then with 8 FC connector can start spreading the traffic.

The company had me routing the data thru a fabric switch MDS9500, separate from the main traffic as this was a test.
Most of production was on 4 other MDS9500 switches.

Monitor of the switch, did not show a bottleneck going to the servers, only on the 4 8GB FC going to the XtremeIO.
Connect to different blades on the 9500.

Don’t think they have touched it since I left. Nor on the other 8 SAN units.

We have been using the solution for two years.

We had some stability issues. Initially, one of the ports failed. The unit could not use a LUN larger than 2TB. After testing all our variables, it was determined that it was XtremeIO, and a patch was created.

The servers were attached with both PowerPath and VMware 5.1 datastores, via a MDS 9500 Fabric Switch network.

It didn't expand to the second Node X-2, although that was a stated option.

The technical support was poor, even during the port or 2TB limit. It was rare to hear back from the technical analyst looking at the unit from ESRS.

Over my thirty years in the IT field, I have tried many solutions. I worked with:

• NetApp
• EMC SANs
• Direct attached SCSI drive units
• An IBM 4300 unit attached by VMware 2.5

Compared to others, the setup and operation is easy. I worked at the company almost three years, learning XtremeIO with little assistance from co-workers or the vendor.

Even before Dell bought it, EMC pricing was steep.

We evaluated Pure Storage and NetApp.

Our company didn’t send anyone to operations training until we had the unit for two years. I would advise you to send your technical expert to take the training early on.

This product was the best fit for our 5000+ active VDI environment. It also works well with database use cases.

The speed is extremely valuable. It is blazing fast. The inline deduplication is amazing and the snapshot capability is very useful.

• The physical architecture could use some higher levels of redundancy.
• The past upgrades were highly impactful to active workloads.
• Previous levels were also susceptible to security vulnerability scanning.

There were stability issues with upgrades and general protection against data center power outages.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I never had any issues with support on the storage array.

We never ran VDI on any other storage platform, although we did have any other options available: NetApp, 7-Mode/cDOT, VMAX.

The racking and initial setup was performed by EMC services. This is the normal case for this product. The first two setups were not installed properly. However, the other five installations were perfect.

I was not active in this portion of the product deployment.

I never saw any active workloads on other products.

I would make sure you do not put all your eggs in one basket on this hardware.

I would make sure updates have an extended down window and are prepared for the array to not service I/O during these updates as a worst case scenario.

It deduplicates well, but I would not run a database and the log files on the same array, to be safe.

It allowed us to shrink our storage footprint in the datacenter and it increased our performance.

Performance and deduplication. This is a very robust block storage option that offers both performance and data optimization.

It is great when a product can deliver high-end performance capabilities while offering a very competitive price point.

• The new UI could be simplified and the implementation should be simplified.
• The UI is easier to use than other EMC offerings, but still takes a pure storage admin to manage and maintain.
• Ease of use is key in the converged and hyper-converged world that requires administrators to have both hypervisor and storage skills.
• Arrays should be “set it and forget it”, including the replication features, which should not require separate products.
• Implementation and expansion require EMC or a partner to implement. However, to be a true scale-out solution, it should be something that customers can do themselves.

We have not had any stability issues.

There is a limit to scalability, but we have not reached it yet.

Technical support is excellent.

We did have a previous solution. This allowed us to move to a smaller footprint with better performance.

The initial setup was very complex. Have the manufacturer or a partner install it.

The pricing is simple but requires other products for robust data recovery and replication.

Make sure you understand the shutdown and redundancy for this product. Test these features to protect the storage controller’s journaling.

Prior to the XtremIO, we just could not perform the data warehousing activities that enable our company to achieve business objectives necessary for being in the ultra-competitive insurance provider world.

The acquisition of XtremIO for our data warehouse was easy to configure and set up. XtremIO is so easy to manage. It hasn't taken away from our ability to support the remainder of our existing environment.

Additionally, we use an XtremIO cluster for VDI. Again, the speed with which we are able to provide VDI enables a complete company-wide VDI rollout!!

Ease of management, aside from the serious performance, is the best feature. We can set it and forget it. We can quickly see performance stats in case there is ever any question.

The upgrade ability seems to have improved. I believe having more replication options comparatively to VMAX (other than RecoverPoint) would be great. Maybe something like SRDF (which is symm only replication, but something like this).

We have not had stability issues with either environment (DataWarehouse or VDI). It has been rock solid.

We did have some initial issues, given the 3.x version we were on. We ended up migrating from 10TB bricks to a 20TB brick cluster when we upgraded.

Customer support, when we have needed it, has been OK. We recently had some volume configuration issues related to VMware ESXi 5.5 and it took entirely too long (over eight hours) to get us back going.

It seemed that it was not because of XtremIO (or VMware for that matter). They were on the bridge call together, and didn't offer much of a solution.

We were using Nimble Storage and HPE and had just purchased EMC Symmetrix VMAX 10k.

We just received a new system which was extremely simple to install. Professional services performed the install, but we helped.

It's not cheap, but it absolutely gets the job done. I don't have any real comment regarding licensing specifically.

We evaluated Nimble Storage and NetApp solutions, but nothing compared.

Do an on-premise PoC to see how simple it is and test the performance.

Run through a Mitrend data analysis if you want an understanding of deduplication rates for the mileage you will get out of it.

You can run it to 100%. However, why would you want to risk of hitting the wall if you run out of storage?!

The fact that we can put up to five times more data on the XtremIO X-Brick prevents us from having to buy large amounts of disks.

This enclosure occupies six rack units of space, which means we aren’t paying a lot of money for rack space in our co-location facility.

XtremIO’s capability to run any workload without much in the way of design considerations makes this very easy to use and size. The configuration of the product is simple, as is creating and presenting volumes.

The snapshot capabilities, that hardly consume any disk space, are also impressive.

If Dell/EMC were to add native replication to the XtremIO, that would be a great improvement.

Right now, external appliances are needed to replicate XtremIO to XtremIO, or to another EMC system.

Having built-in replication will cut the cost of data recovery solutions by removing the expensive appliances and the software required to make the data flow between the two sites.

Until the release of XtremIO X2 this summer, there is currently no “built-in” replication capabilities between XtremIO appliances. This is a feature that some competitors have that XtremIO Gen 1 does not.

In order to replicate block data from XtremIO to XtremIO, or XtremIO to another EMC product, a customer must purchase RecoverPoint appliances and licenses.

To replicate virtual machines, you can either buy RecoverPoint appliances and licenses, vSphere replication and licenses, Zerto, Veeam, or another product.

Buying these add-ons increases the cost of maintaining redundant copies of XtremIO data.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have consumed ~756GB of disk on a 2-brick cluster and have much more than the physical capacity of the system provisioned. There have been no problems with scalability at all.

I would give technical support the highest rating. Dell/EMC appears to have employed the team that developed XtremIO. Deep product questions or operational questions make it to them.

We were using VNX. The compression and deduplication numbers, as well as the level of effort needed to build RAID groups on this storage processor array to support workloads, caused us to consider XtremIO.

The initial setup was totally as expected.

This is the best flash array on the market for high-end workloads, so expect to pay for that. But the support subscription cost is fixed for seven years, which made it easier for us to plan on the maintenance costs.

We did not evaluate other options.

If you have the workloads that require the performance that XtremIO provides, without having to consider what workloads you are throwing at this array, then this solution is for you.

Reduced the Oracle database refresh times (10TB) from 48 hours to 4 hours.

• I/O performance and low latency
• Deduplication and cloning capability

Management and reporting need improvement. Cloning could be easier.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We used EMC VMAX. Latency was inconsistent and it lacked cloning and deduplication.

Cloning was complicated due to necessary scripting.

We evaluated Oracle Exadata, EMC VMAX (SSD), and EMC VMAX.

• Provide clear requirements
• Test to verify that the results are as expected
• Spend time to carefully integrate it into your support model, including reporting/dashboards and proactive monitoring.

Our organization has seen our customers' performance increase substantially for their database and VDI applications using this product.

Compression and deduplication are valuable because they help reduce the storage footprint required for our customer’s environments.

Snapshots are valuable because of their seamless nature, as well as the minimal space each snapshot takes.

The GUI is still Java based, and this needs to be fixed. It needs a way to determine the deduplication of each LUN and what the impact would be if we were to move data from one LUN to another.

There have been some stability issues with the code that have been corrected in later versions.

We understand the way the platform can scale, so we scale within the parameters.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

Our customers switched from the older generation of VNX to XtremIO. It was ten times faster and deduplication/compression allowed for a much smaller footprint in the data center.

The initial setup can be complex if there is an issue during the setup. Otherwise, this is not too bad to install.

Pricing and licensing are in line with other products from other manufacturers. You get what you pay for.

At the time, we did not evaluate other alternatives.

The flash market is saturated with vendors and their products. This product is an all-around solid player. However, make sure that deduplication is a major factor before purchasing. If snapshot and snapshot consolidation is key, then this is the product for you.

• Low latency
• High I/O
• Large bandwidth
• Helps my SAN perform at a high rate

It has improved the end-user experience:

• More fluid VDI
• Faster SQL searches
• Quicker data migrations

Replication: XtremIO has none

Controller failover: When you lose one of the scale-out nodes on XtremIO, your hosts will see a large drop in I/O while it occurs and EMC is unaware of how their controllers work. As it is shown in their demos, the work load after a failure is spread across each node. But if you look at the “ACTUAL” process, the work is loaded on each node until that node gets to 100%. Then, the work goes to the next node and repeats. So, in the event of a failure, you will have several nodes at 100% and others at 25% load.

Data recovery: In the event of a dual power supply failure, the array has to be recovered from a backup.

I have used EMC for two years.

We did have stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is average. EMC has no telemetry.

We switched for performance and cost.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There are better solutions available.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble Storage, NetApp, IBM, and Cisco.

Don’t use this product. There are better solutions out there.