XtremIO 3.0 adds inline data services, expands family

EMC Corporation has announced a multitude of new features and configurations, ecosystem integrations, and business programs for EMC® XtremIO™ all-flash arrays. Collectively, these offer more scale, more capabilities, and more support for consolidated, virtualized, and performance-hungry workloads.

Having already surpassed $100 million in demand within six-months of product availability, EMC believes XtremIO is the fastest-growing all-flash array, and the fastest-growing storage array in history. New XtremIO 3.0 capabilities deliver enterprise data centers with leaps forward in performance, consolidation, and application agility through intelligent always-on, inline data services. These free software upgrades, available for existing XtremIO arrays, improve IT agility and deliver breakthrough user experience and economics.

The XtremIO value proposition is simple: Advanced always-on, inline data services are critical to enabling superior economics, usability, capabilities, and consistent and predictable high performance regardless of workload – it’s an architectural must-have for all-flash arrays. XtremIO set the benchmark for consistent and predictable performance, and now, with these enhancements, delivers new levels of value through a breakthrough metadata space-efficient snapshot capability, improved capacity efficiency, and additional rich data services that make enterprise data centers simpler and more agile. The software-centric XtremIO architecture easily and rapidly offers new capabilities through a simple code upgrade.

Technology Highlights
· New entry-level configuration called the Starter X-Brick™. Available now, this offers the full performance and data services of a standard XtremIO array in a low-cost 5TB configuration, with online non-disruptive capacity expansion to a full 10TB X-Brick. Customers simply add more SSDs when they want to expand capacity.
· New, larger scale-out clusters up to six X-Bricks. Ideal for consolidated workloads, XtremIO arrays now support up to six 20TB X-Bricks with 12 active controllers, enabling a 50% IOPS performance increase and 50% more capacity, while maintaining XtremIO’s sub-millisecond latency (orderable this quarter).
· Industry’s first writeable snapshot technology that is space-efficient for both data and metadata. Available now, XtremIO snapshots are free from limitations of performance, features, topology, or capacity reservations. With their unique in-memory metadata architecture, XtremIO arrays now instantly create entire application development and test environments where every engineer gets a personal sandbox, enable high-performance analytics and reporting copies without any brute force data movement, and deliver near-CDP capabilities for data protection. In addition, XtremIO arrays now effectively serve petabytes of capacity from a small and cost effective physical flash footprint.
· New inline compression. Available this quarter, XtremIO arrays deliver up to 4X their previous usable capacity through 100% inline compression. A six X-Brick cluster now effectively delivers petabyte-scale flash so efficiently that flash becomes viable and cost-effective in places never before thought possible. XtremIO clusters with 90 TB of usable flash capacity now effectively support 540 TB of effective capacity at typical 6:1 data reduction (inline deduplication plus inline compression) ratios. When combined with XtremIO’s powerful snapshot capabilities, XtremIO now easily supports petabytes of functional application data.
· New inline Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE). Available now, XtremIO arrays now securely encrypt all data stored on the all-flash array, delivering protection for regulated use cases in sensitive industries such as healthcare, finance, and the government.
· Substantial performance improvements for databases, bandwidth-hungry workloads, and virtual machine cloning operations. Available this quarter on all existing XtremIO arrays, the latest XtremIO software delivers optimizations that increase real-world application performance. Now OLTP databases run nearly 1.5X faster, data warehouses achieve nearly 2X better throughput, and cloning virtual machines takes half the time.
· More support for EMC software, storage, converged infrastructure solutions, as well as OpenStack deployments. XtremIO supports EMC ViPR® SRM Suite (available now), EMC ViPR software-defined storage platform (available this quarter) and EMC VSPEX® (available this quarter), complementing existing integration with EMC VPLEX®, EMC PowerPath®, VCE Vblock, VMware VAAI, and VMware vSphere plugins. XtremIO is supported (available this quarter) as Cinder block storage in OpenStack clouds.

The combination of XtremIO’s scale-out architecture, data services, and unique flash endurance help redefine the traditional storage lifecycle and its total cost of ownership. A new XtremIO Xpect More Program is now available, designed to make it easier to deploy XtremIO with a long-term, predictable TCO. This promotion offers customers three fundamental benefits:
· Maintenance price protection: For up to 7-years, annual support pricing will not increase from its initial price. This allows EMC to provide the lowest TCO over the full lifecycle of the arrays.
· Investment protection: Offers a leading 3-year money-back warranty if XtremIO does not meet its specifications and other remediation isn’t sufficient.
· Flash endurance protection: EMC will replace any SSDs should they reach 95% of their endurance limit within the period of the customer’s support contract. XtremIO is confident that customers never need to worry about flash endurance because of the XtremIO architecture’s unique write-efficiencies and its superior enterprise-grade MLC flash.

The Xpect More Program complements the existing EMC XtremIO “$1 Million Inline All the Time Guarantee” – which has yet to be claimed – and the EMC Flash Rescue Program, a trade-in program that makes it simple for customers to trade-in alternative flash arrays that have not lived up to expectations due to system-level garbage collection, poor usable capacity, and other performance issues.