Several processes that used to take several hours to complete are now taking minutes to complete.
There are advanced features we currently are not utilizing (AppSync, Snaps of Prod, etc.) but they are features we plan to deploy that would bring additional efficiencies.
Speed and reliability: This system hosts several mission-critical, latency-sensitive workloads and XtremIO has delivered on those promises.
I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks.
-You could not mix drive sizes
-You could not add just a single XBrick
-You had to fully populate both XBrick’s
All of this equals a very expensive\large upgrade path
However; after saying all of this, EMC announced a new generation of XTremIO (X2) which allows more granular growth, mixed drive size, etc…
(You need to purchase new hardware – I don’t believe they are adding these features to existing XTremIO Clusters.)
Knock on wood, we have not had any stability issues.
We have not specifically had scalability problems. Upgrade paths are fixed.
Paths, capacity, and performance scale as X-Bricks are added.
Technical support is excellent. This product line receives high-level support.
The only negative was enough field support during early deployments (longer lead times than average). That has since been resolved with additional training and staffing levels.
We were using several other technologies prior to introducing XtremIO.
We switched because PoC testing proved the all-flash option to offer superior performance as compared to existing in-house technologies.
The install and setup was very easy and straightforward. With the proper pre-planning and facility work (power, cooling, network & FC connections), we were up and operational within a few hours:
- Installed a virtual appliance to manage the clusters.
- Assigned IPs to network ports for management.
- Connected FC ports to existing SAN fabric.
- Zoned hosts to ports.
- Carved out LUNs and assigned to zoned hosts.
At first glance, this solution is pretty expensive. However, when you factor in inline deduplication, inline compression, zero-overhead snaps, thin, etc., you find the overall cost to be inline\better than with traditional tier 1 storage subsystems.
With some workloads that benefit from compression and deduplication, costs are actually better than some tier 2 subsystems (while latency remains <1ms).
This makes some happy dev testers!
We did research several other vendors (Pure Storage, Hitachi, IBM, etc.), but we only conducted a PoC on EMC’s XtremIO.
Download and utilize a free deduplication\compression tool to identify effective rates to determine effective capacity cost.