So EMC announced their third major code release of XtremIO with a few key features it was lacking to be competitive in the All Flash Array market (namely in-line compression). EMC is offering a free XtremIO 3.0 software code upgrade to existing XtremIO arrays when the code comes out in September.
This will give customers the new in-memory metadata snapshots. Now these aren’t your average run-of-the-mill snapshots. Since they are all done in memory, there is no capacity or performance overhead with them. In fact, the only data that would leave memory to go to the SSDs are any unique 4k chunks of data. This is like storage black magic if you think about it. Imagine, you are able to set up a test/dev environment that looks, smells, and tastes like a production environment. All while getting the performance of a production environment without losing capacity on your valuable all flash storage array.
Also announced with the 3.0 release is the new inline, always-on data compression. This is key for database environments since most databases don’t dedupe very well. According to EMC, this should add up to 4X more usable capacity then just dedupe alone could for databases.
Not all the changes were software though. They also announce a new entry-level 5TB Starter X-Brick. This is great for SMB customers who want to look at an AFA (All Flash Array) with out the AFA price. They will get all the great features like in-line compression, dedupe, etc without making the investment in a full X-Brick.
And all of these features backed by the “XtremIO Xpect More Program”. Which comes with 7-year maintenance price protection, 3-year money-back warranty, 7-year flash endurance protection. All this coming after EMC announced “The XtremIO $1Million Guarantee”, offering one million dollars to the first customer that can prove their XtremIO system’s inline data services have switched off, been throttled back or defaulted to a “system garbage collection” state.
It is easy to see that EMC is dumping money into XtremIO and really believe Flash storage is the way of the future. It will be interesting to see what updates come out in the coming months.
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