Dell XtremIO Reviews

Its consistent speed and replication features are most valuable to us. It provides a better user experience and replication for DR purposes.

In the VDI arena, it helped speed up VDI sessions and also helped improve the amount of VDIs versus disks.

Replication: EMC should have native replication ability, not something you have to take an outage for in order to install, i.e., if you did not purchase the replication when you rolled out the storage array.

Native replication is important for a few reasons:

• If something goes wrong, it gives you more of a "one throat to choke" scenario, meaning you only have to talk to one or two vendors.
• Native replication is usually cheaper, especially IP replication (versus fiber-based replication).
• When replication is native, you can usually have more insight at to what is replicated and what is not, instead of having to query various different things to get an answer.
• Native replication is usually easier to set up and maintain. It also has little less administrative work and overhead costs.

I have used this solution for about two years.

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating.

We had VDI running on another storage array. Thus, we switched to this solution so that we could utilize the speed and the inline deduplication.

Make sure you understand and check how EMC’s replication and licensing policy for replication works.

Also make sure you are at the latest code and fully understand how the grouping and clustering of hosts on the storage array works.

• 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.

Compression and de-duplication are the most valuable features, especially when compared to other All-flash arrays like Solidfire, Violin Memory or Pure Storage.

Overall space usage has decreased, plus input/output operations per second (IOPS). Performance has increased exponentially.

The replication and DR capabilities could be improved, since there is no native replication technique with XtremIO. EMC wants customers to rely on EMC RecoverPoint for those needs or VPLEX for DR sorts. Native replication is needed.

I have used it for 3 years.

I did not encounter any stability issues, it is very user friendly and easy to use.

Scalability was non-hazardous and even online.

Technical support was exemplary with a very fast response time by Dell EMC.

We used to employ high-end and mid-range products from multiple vendors like EMC and NetApp before we switched to XtremIO for good performance and space economical-ability.

Initial setup of this product following stacking and racking servers is straightforward. The product is not complex in its modus-operandi and you have the bonus of sources and support availability.

Pricing is definitely on the higher side and licensing plus maintenance can come as a package. I recommend this as a good negotiation technique with EMC.

We first evaluated and selected VIMM (NVRAM chip) arrays which were faster than XtremIO but costlier. We then looked at new players like Nutanix, and even ScaleIO. But in the end, XtremIO turned out to be cost-effective and at the same time worth spending for the change.

Be it XtremIO or anything else, you need to see that requirements are aligned with the following:

- Data Centre space and cost.
- Storage growth trend and capacity forecast.
- Application performance and requirements.
- Operational readiness and implementation timelines.

• Dedupe, because we achieve 3.5X space savings with XtremIO
• Snapshot copies
• Ease of use
• Improvement in storage efficiency without compromising on performance

We have just used the product in a proof of concept test and we are yet to move it into production.

Integration with other EMC SAN storage array ecosystems like VMAX3, Unity, etc., especially for consistency group protection: This will help to consistently recover applications which are spread across multiple product lines like VMAX3 and XtremIO for various reasons.

I could give an example of SQL DB hosted in EMC VMAX array with SRDF replication to a remote site for disaster recovery.

If we have to move part of the volumes (like TempDB, Indexes,logs. Etc) into XtremIO and part remains in VMAX, the whole server won’t be able to able to get recovered with consistent point in time of recovery due to different replication technologies in 2 different platforms (VMAX and XtremIO).

I meant to say that it may be perfect for other environments but not for environments which are heavily dependent upon SRDF based replication. There might be ways to get around like implementing Recoverpoint for VMAX and XtremIO but the integration was complex in our use case.

I have been using the product for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is good.

We did not use any other solution beforehand.

The initial setup was straightforward with a very simple-to-use interface.

All the software-inclusive licensing simplifies the cost model.

We did not evaluate other options.

Mileages vary, so please test the dedupe rate and performance metrics you are achieving for your workload, before implementing in production.

VDI is one of the top mission-critical things we offer our users. This storage runs our whole VDI environment and barely shows a blip on I/O. Previously, we had ran the VDI on non-flash storage and when Windows updates came out, we had to install them in schedule segments so as not to overload the storage. With this storage, we do them all at the same time and there is no impact to performance if 1 or 100 VMs reboot at the same time.

Dedupe, compression and high I/O are the most valuable features. It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC.

Get rid of the Java aspect of the GUI console. Basically, the GUI to administrator the array uses Java as its base to run on. Java at best is buggy and prone to loading issues, so moving away from this platform would be nice.

We had no issues with stability.

We had no issues with scalability.

I would give technical support 9 out of 10. Nothing is perfect but they sure are close to it.

We previously used deployed EMC VNX storage (and still use it for our lower performance applications) and before that, we had Dell EqualLogic. We switched to an all-flash array as we wanted high performance storage for our three most critical applications (Exchange, ERP and VDI). We wanted to do a full VDI platform for all our users and locations. We wanted the best experience for them, as any hiccup would mean a lower buy-in rate from them. This storage made that task much easier.

We bought it through VCE, so they included setup with it. Things went smoothly. When we did receive the storage, within a day or two, we had a controller failure but since it had two controllers, there was no impact to users. Support was fantastic and got it replaced over the weekend, and we didn’t even have to do anything other than authorize them into our data center to replace the failed part.

It is costly but worth it. If the network or infrastructure you have is always a sticking point to users or management, spending the bucks on an all-flash array can help win them over.

We looked at more EMC VNX storage but at that time, we were not aware of this offering. When we started doing the talks with EMC, our rep pointed at this product line and once we saw a demo, we were sold. After more research, it didn’t take us long to get the paperwork in place. We also didn’t look at other vendors, as we utilize VCE as our main infrastructure at our data center so regardless of what model or product line of EMC we bought, VCE would handle the support. This was one of the main reasons of going with VCE, so we wanted to carry it on with the new storage.

I wish we bought double the capacity but we only had so much to spend, as I would put every application/server on this array.

We use it together with VPLEX, which virtualizes the storage array with all its benefits.

This virtualization layer adds to the latency. With XtremIO behind the VPLEX, the response times are far below the response time we have on our other storage arrays, even with the SSD onboard.

The data reduction (deduplication and compression) is the most valuable feature in our business case.

We calculated a reduction ratio of 3:1 to get a positive case, and we actually reached a little bit higher (3,1:1). This makes our business case even better.

Even with this feature, the response time is far below what we received with our other storage arrays.

Another valuable feature is the guaranteed sub-millisecond response time for a 4K block.

It has no storage replication. The replication is done through the VPLEX. In some cases where we don’t need the flexibility of the virtualization layer, we could free up resources on the VPLEX by using the storage replication.

Until now, we have not encountered any issues with stability.

We did not immediately have scaling issues. Scaling up is, in fact, very easy. Just “buy” an X-brick of 40TB and plug it in. The system does the rebalancing automatically. Since we use a VPLEX, the scaling limitation lies with the VPLEX.

Technical support is good. The installation went smoothly from DEL EMC’s site. We did not encounter real technical issues yet, but the questions we had were all answered within an acceptable time frame.

Part replacements are done transparently without any intervention from our site.

We used HPE and EMC storage arrays, but the main reason we switched was the positive business case. We have a lot more flexibility (VPLEX), reduction of cost and floor space (XtremIO), due to deduplication and compression.

The initial setup of the XtermIO was very straightforward in combination with VPLEX. The setup of the VPLEX was little bit more complex, but XtremIO just needed to be connected to the VPLEX.

XtremIO is pretty straightforward about pricing. However, you need to look at your data so you can estimate, with the advice of DEL EMC, what data reduction ratio you will reach. In our case, a 3:1 reduction ration gave us a positive case compared to other storage arrays.

The XtremIO by itself without a virtualization layer has some drawbacks, like storage replication. I really would recommend them to install it in combination with a storage virtualization layer.

We used the product for our internal customers (Banking). The performance really improved for the end users with reduced costs.

It has very good performance for an application which needs lower latency and a better response, for example, in microseconds. It's very easy to use in terms of administrative tasks on the GUI.

At times, it's difficult to track down allocated resources as compared to other solutions, like VMAX and VNX, because it's completely software-based.

The GUI could be modified more in terms of how the different components are linked to each other.

Yes, we had issues with data corruption on one of the X-Bricks. The issue propagated to other X-Bricks as well.

No, in terms of scalability, we didn't encounter issues. It was very easy to add X-Bricks to the system.

Technical support was great in terms of first response and further troubleshooting assistance.

Yes, we were using a VMAX solution before. This product was incorporated in order to get better performance at a reduced cost for our internal customers.

I was not involved with the initial setup phase. My role was more focused towards administrative and implementation tasks after the product was installed.

Again, both the pricing and licensing were handled by another group. So, I can't comment on it.

Yes, there were multiple options evaluated and also incorporated for some percentage of the workload, like NetApp C-mode array. Specifically, XtremIO was considered for Xtreme Performance as advertised by vendors at a lower cost as compared to existing storage arrays, like VMAX and VNX.

It's very good in terms of performance and the ease of use of its GUI. However, we had issues at the data corruption level, which resulted in multiple X-Brick failures. It's a big question for the stability and availability when we have enterprise level customers on such an Xtreme Performance array.