EMC Announces XtremIO 3.0 Adds New Inline Data Services Expands Family

LONDON - July 08, 2014 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today 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, XtremIOsnapshots 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 Systems, 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.

Pricing and Availability
All XtremIO 2.4 capabilities (Starter X-Brick, inline encryption, writeable snapshots) are available immediately (and began shipping in May 2014), and XtremIO 3.0 capabilities (inline compression, performance improvements) are expected to ship this quarter. All available products are also available from the online EMC Store, which offers an additional resource that makes it easier and faster for customers to research EMC products, compare features, review list prices, and request quotes.

Industry Analyst Quote:
David Vellante, Chief Research Officer at The Wikibon Project

“The impact of flash storage will go far beyond performance. 10X performance improvements relative to hard disk are really just table stakes. The disruptive opportunities with flash storage are in delivering a new breed of applications supported by advanced data services that were not even possible on disk. These capabilities will dramatically simplify complex application environments, streamline cumbersome workflows and unlock a step function in new business value.” 

Customer Quote:
Craig Englund, Principal Architect at Boston Scientific

“Last year we began to redefine our data center with XtremIO for our global VDI deployment and the results have been nothing short of amazing.  Today we’ve expanded our use of XtremIO to include our virtual server environment running SQL Server databases and the results have exceeded our expectations.  For example, we took a key database from physical to virtual, ran it on fewer cores, and saw performance increase by 300% instantly – just by moving it to XtremIO.  The time our DBAs have gained back from trying to tune the database and SQL code, combined with the faster time-to-results on our large queries has an almost incalculable business value.  EMC’s pace of innovation is simply breathtaking.”

Executive Quote
CJ Desai, President, EMC Emerging Technology Products Division (Twitter: @CJ_Desai)

“XtremIO heralds a new era in storage array design, architected from the ground-up for consistent and predictable random access performance. With the addition of rich new inline data services, the value XtremIO delivers to customers, which vaulted EMC to #1 in the all-flash array market a mere six weeks after general availability, is greatly extended. With better performance, more capacity, more capabilities, and further integration across the EMC product portfolio, XtremIO is the all-flash array platform of choice, helping end-users redefine what’s possible in their data centers and application environments.”