Dell XtremIO Reviews

The primary use case for XtremIO is for managing business applications, either critical or non-critical. It's mainly used in the banking and finance sectors, but it can be used for other sectors as well. XtremIO is an on-premises solution. 

A valuable feature of XtremIO is that, in terms of administration, it's simple and manageable. 

If you are looking at flash storage solutions, XtremIO doesn't offer any unique features. Most of my customers are migrating their workload from XtremIO to other formats because of this. If you look at Hitachi or IBM, they have the VSP G series or FlashSystem, these products have many features available. We can scale up and scale out, add multiple nodes, use a global cache, and we don't have the same kinds of features in XtremIO. Because of the lack of unique and key features, most customers nowadays don't want XtremIO. 

XtremIO needs to have a global cache. Internal architecture should also be redefined and existing architecture sectioned off. Additional unique features should be added, rather than just common features like replication. Right now, XtremIO is an all-flash array, which is costly. I would like to see them come up with a hybrid model, one that is more cost-effective and may offer more benefits to customers. 

Since XtremIO is all-flash, it doesn't currently have NAND support. I would like to see interface support from XtremIO, and at least NAND or SD card support. If they supported a combination of SSDs and SDs, that could be beneficial to some small and medium businesses. 

Dell should also provide a data analysis tool, in the case of any issues with internal components like controls, cache, backup drive, etc. It would be helpful to have a tool to troubleshoot performance issues. 

A last feature is that XtremIO should have a cloud mobility option, in addition to flash. XtremIO has no data migration features, so these features should be implemented without needing to purchase an additional license or application. XtremIO needs some fine-tuning and these are where I would start. 

I have been working with XtremIO for three years. 

This solution is stable and has good performance. 

The scalability is good. The option to scale out is available on XtremIO. 

I had a good experience with Dell EMC's support. 

The setup process is simple. 

My company proves implementation and maintenance services. 

XtremIO is an all-flash array, which means it's a costly solution. When compared with general mid-range storage solutions, this is more expensive. As far as I know, there are no additional costs besides the license. 

Other similar options are the Hitachi VSP G series or IBM's FlashSystem. These products have features that are missing from XtremIO. 

I recommend XtremIO primarily for big companies, but I would like to see improvements in terms of feature availability and reliability. Also, XtremIO doesn't support the IBM iSeries. 

I would rate this solution a five out of ten, right in the middle. It's missing a lot of features and has a lot of room for improvement. 

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?!

It provides reliable and predictable performance with very little administration required beyond the initial setup.

• Speed – All Flash makes this array very extremely responsive to virtually all workloads, besting all of our spindle-based arrays by a large margin
• Linear performance – The XtremIO wasn’t the fastest in all tests against other all flash arrays, but even with a massive workload, the response time and user experience were absolutely predictable with no sharp drop-offs.
• Administration simplicity – The GUI is very intuitive and simple to use. Other vendors should take note.
• Excellent deduplication – An excellent feature and strength of the product. Inline dedupe gives you about as real-time on dedupe stats as you can get.

Native data replication: To replicate data between XtremIO devices, you need to use EMC’s RecoverPoint appliances to move the data. More and more arrays are providing the ability to replicate the data natively without the need for a secondary device to do it for them.

The EMC VNX platform is the same way. It only requires native replication via RecoverPoint. EMC’s flagship VMAX and their new Unity platform replicate natively. Even EMC's Isilon does data replication natively.

XtremeIO needs to catch up. That’s about the only Achilles heel of the product.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward. Follow the installation guide and it’s a slam dunk.

We evaluated HPE 3PAR, Pure Storage, and EMC VNX all-flash arrays.

We had an established EMC footprint in our data center and a good relationship. Exploring their AFA made sense. To keep things honest, we evaluated other products and conducted a PoC with other vendors.

The XtremeIO product wasn’t always the fastest, but it was absolutely linear in performance and we encountered no issues. The PoC kept pricing honest as well.

• 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.

Data services: Deduplication and Compression. XtremIO performs both these data efficiencies in-line with no latency cost to the hosts. Also the APIs, using APIs you can provision an entire ESXi cluster using PowerShell and VC credentials within a few minutes.

I have leveraged XtremIO to reduce data center foot print significantly saving my company tens of thousands annually in floor space, power, and cooling.

Volume limits of 8192 per XMS and stability. I have unfortunately had some bad experience with bugs and failed upgrades. It has improved with the new 4.0 code but it’s still not as good as typical EMC.

XtremIO and Pure Storage have a volume limit. XtremIO is 8192 logical volumes per XMS management server. XMS can manage multiple XIO clutters, if you do that your volume count is 8192 across all the clusters XMS is managing. Pure Storage has just released code to go to 5000. A logical volume on XIO is any volume, whether it’s a snapshot or a volume presented to a host. Whereas Pure Storage only counts a snapshot that is hydrated.

Two years.

See my comments above regarding room for improvement.

Not yet.

I have had pretty good support including being escalated to engineering very quickly, this could be considered a good thing or a bad thing…

Mostly all VMAX, we switched for the consolidation of datacenter space.

It’s more complicated than a VNX but easier than a VMAX. The fact the array has a separate management server and that server has its own code levels that are not in line with the array can be confusing, much like Solutions Enabler. I highly recommend always purchasing a physical XMS and only use the virtual appliance in a pinch.

If you plan on replicating XIO to XIO you will have to buy RecoverPoint, XIO to XIO only needs SE RecoverPoint lic but that won’t allow you to use RPA to migrate from VNX/VMAX to XIO so consider the EX lic. Remember ever snapshot counts as a logical volume so every replication snapshot counts toward your overall 8192 volume limit. I highly recommend large LUNs to keep your volume count low. We are using 4TB or larger.

I POC’d XIO, Pure Storage, and IBM SVC with TMS array. We chose XIO because of its scalable by adding bricks where as Pure Storage you have to buy more arrays creating islands and more management. Also, had some issues with PURE post processing of data services. We felt the SVC for IBM introduced significant latency to their AFA TMS. TMS alone is the fastest All Flash Array but it doesn’t have any data services, that is what SVC is used for.

Consider your migration methods to this array and know your data. For instance, if you are running Windows 2012 you may consider disabling ODX on the entire array which is disruptable or disabling on every single 2012 host. Talk to your SE about this.

Snapshots, deduplication, compression – We are using the XtremIO for multi-version databases, in this respect being able to snapshot a database consistency group to create DEV/UAT versions while utilizing deduplication/thin provisioning/compression allows us to maintain the numerous copies of each database we need. To go along with that, being able to refresh any snapshot set with the contents of any other snapshot set (in the same lineage) allowed us to reduce our refresh times from hours to minutes.

DEV/UAT refresh periods reduced from hours or longer to under five minutes.

Volume count. A hard limit of 8192 volumes per cluster. This becomes an issue with DR replication and RecoverPoint and trying to maintain the best RPO possible.

There is a limit of 8192 volumes/LUNS that can be created. This includes all volumes/LUNs presented to hosts along with all snapshots, so it becomes very easy to bump up against the limits in certain circumstances. For us, we use RecoverPoint to replication between XtremIO devices, and since RecoverPoint creates a snapshot of each volume to allow for point in time recovery that results in a lot of snapshots that have to be accounted for.

One year.

None, the product has been working as expect without issue.

None that weren’t expected. This is a scale out product, not scale up or scale up and out. You can go from 1 XIO brick to 2, 2 to 4 and then 4 to 8. If you know this up front it is very easy to plan around.

Extremely good. EMC has been outstanding with support, especially when using their call-home utility ESRS.

Yes, we had a previous all flash array vendor, however we encountered many issues with support, scalability and a general lack of data efficiency services that ultimately were more important than all flash performance.

Initial setup is very straightforward. There is a configuration workbook you complete to provide the basic information (IP addresses, domain names, mail, SNMP, etc.) and work with a Dell EMC project manager to get it installed. Array comes preconfigured from a storage standpoint, so once it is up and running you can start allocating storage immediately.

Not much to a basic XIO installation, everything is licensed initially. There is no built in replication or other business continuity features, if you need that you will need to look at products like VPLEX to sit in front of the XtremIO.

Pure Storage and Violin Memory.

Understand your workloads and use-cases. This is not a perfect solution for all flash workloads. If you cannot take advantage of deduplication and compression there may be better/cheaper solutions. If you want simplified replication, this is not the product for you. For us, performance wasn’t the prime driver. We wanted a scalable solution and our workloads could take advantage of deduplication extremely well so this was an obvious choice.

• Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM): It allows instant creation of high performance copies by accelerating the environmental testing with no need for redoing builds. A duplicate copy can be spawned up for DEV- trunk/ Integration/Test with QA.

• Virtual Desktop infrastructure (VDI): Where one consolidated infrastructure that leverages off resources can act as a baseline and be locked down with a secure image to all call center agents.
• Rapid Inline Deduplication/ Compression: Helps capacity planning to reduce the amount of SAN needed. Prevents the deduplication of the same data. This can allow ratios of 2:1, or even as high as 7:1, depending upon what data subsets are used.

• Utilizing the snapshot technology, (recovery point), has been great for development.
• Inline data reduction using deduplication and/or compression has improved batch times for one of our PostgreSQL database environments.

• The management server needs to be integrated. XtremIO VNX and VMAX have separate management software stacks for managing the various arrays.
• We would also like to see one universal management view into all these sub-systems. For example, IBM SVC and Pure Storage Purity each have one universal software management view.

I have used it for just over three years.

The earlier version before Version 4.0 had several stability issues. It is now more stable, albeit not 100%.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 6/10.

We have a two vendor approach with HDS and EMC.

The initial setup was straightforward, providing that the correct code levels were applied before initializing.

When considering pricing and licensing issues, note the following:

• The 8192 volume limit
• Snapshots count as logical volume
• Every replicated snapshot also counts

We evaluated Pure Storage, but on a FA-420 controller.

A testing and integration PoC needs to be done with full diligence.

We use Dell EMC XtremIO for block data and VDA profiles.

The most valuable feature of Dell EMC XtremIO is the data protection (DP) group, it is one of the most advanced features in these types of arrays. The dedupe and compression that this array provides both do a superb job.

The replication of Dell EMC XtremIO could improve. In the newer versions they have improved, however, the replication can be improved further where we can include concurrent or cascaded methodologies.

In the next release, the solution could have better integration and if we can host assets on the cloud, such as NetApp has the NetApp volumes, which we can host on the cloud directly called NetApp CVO (cloud volume ONTAP). Dell EMC should come up with something purely on the cloud rather than manage services.

I have been using Dell EMC XtremIO for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable and has good performance, it guarantees millions of files. 

Dell EMC XtremIO is scalable and it is easy to do. However, we cannot have more than four bricks.

We have approximately 10 people in the storage team who use the solution and 5,000 use the services in my organization. 

The solution is used on a daily basis. The media profiles are launched for each user and it communicates to the Dell EMC XtremIO daily.

We contact technical support whenever there's a hardware failure. If there is a software glitch, such as the one we had where the connectivity status used to flicker. It had to show eight parts, but it flickered and showed five, six, seven, and eight, all the parts. The flickering in the database, which resides within the XtremIO management server actively tweaked a bit and we had a support engineering case open for it with the Dell support. However, it didn't materialize, this is something that should be fixed in the next update.

Overall I would rate the support Dell EMC XtremIO a nine out of ten. We don't reach out to them. Nine only because the hardware could be more durable. All the SSD's could use a single-level cell rather than a multi-cell.

I previously used SolidFire and NetApp. There is a third solution I have used called Violin Memory which is not used much, but it's a very good contender. 

The advantages of Dell EMC XtremIO are the market share Dell has and dependability.

All the other solutions are going more towards iSCSI connectivity while Dell is moving away from iSCSI and towards XtremIO's that offer both iSCSI and FC. There is not much development for iSCSI, this is a limiting factor.

The installation was straightforward. If you have everything in place in the network, it would only take two days maximum.

The implementation can be done by the customer, it is done by racking and stacking them.

The solution has a redundant component, there are only disc replacements or battery backups replacement required.

The price of the solution should be reduced. The price matches the price of a VMAX service but it does not have the capability of a VMAX service. However, the prices of Dell EMC XtremIO can be reduceable.

I would recommend this solution to others, it will make their life easier.

I rate Dell EMC XtremIO an eight out of ten.