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back to article EMC braces self for November's all-flash XTremIO launch

EMC is winding itself up to launch its XtremIO flash array on 14 November. This is an all-flash array, gained in EMC's XtremIO acquisition, and it will, of course, be a faster, more power-efficient and cost-efficient array than those of all the competition, with better management software, array backend and server front-end …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wait for manufactured speed numbers

    You can bet that EMC will claim faster speeds without validation from SPEC.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wait for manufactured speed numbers

      This is the dumbest thing i've read all week....and that's saying something because I read youtube comments.

      As much as I dislike EMC, SPEC doesn't 'Validate' anything.

      Wait for the feature set, wait for the pros and cons and make your choice based around what you need, not SPEC.

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      1. Nate Amsden
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        Re: Wait for manufactured speed numbers

        SPEC does validate performance/latency/efficiency numbers along with cost with a common workload across vendors so for that I think it provides a good value. Obviously users shouldn't base their decision entirely on those numbers alone but they can provide insight into trends in the system to see if it's worth pursuing.

        So for example if the cost of the system is really abnormally high relative to competitors a customer can determine that it is not worth spending the time to engage for that platform if they don't have the $$ for it anyway.

        Or if the platform gets good performance, but nearly hits the 47% unused utilization ratios of the SPC-1 benchmark then maybe they decide they'll go for another platform that lets them use more of the capacity and still get good performance.

        Or they can look at the full disclosure to see the system configuration, and determine that HEY this thing is really complicated and I want something easier to manage.

        I remember one vendor from China had disabled their read cache prefetching in the array and devoted everything to write cache for SPC-1. They also happened to disable write cache mirroring as well (also

        disclosed in the full disclosure - no mention of it in the shorter executive summary). They managed to get several hundred thousand IOPS - so impressive headline numbers, but the devil was really in the details.

        SPC-1 is also a lot more trustworthy than the numbers that most vendors spit out themselves. e.g. lots of grand claims about 1 million IOPS.

        I remember one time one of the 3 letter storage vendors came in to my company and quoted really high I/O numbers (abnormally high for the platform in question) - only after I challenged them did they confirm that was purely from cache.

        SPEC sfs is less valuable to me at least since there is less disclosure, especially on the cost side.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The year of VDI, again

    Holy crap, it's the year of VDI, again

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just up the road from Hopkinton and right next to the EMC Westborough campus - SimpliVity.

    Flash array, compression, deduplication, virtualization, datacenter, all in one scalable enclosure.

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  4. garagegeek

    Good reasons make sense, don't go with "hero" specs

    I've been fortunate enough to have got my hands on XtremIO. I've tested it with Citrix XenDesktop 7. And its does what it says on the tin. Really like to inline dedupe that turns 7.5TB usable into up to 70TB logical. Plus true scale-out that's linear on capacity and IOPs.

    As an old VDI veteran my advice is go for a flash array with inline dedupe and scale-out, oh yes. But also ensure its bulletproof and supported by a major vendor and not a startup. You don't want to be in the situation when the helpdesk lites up because >2000 users can't logon. Don't go there...... Choose your Flash Array with care. Its not all about specs and "hero" numbers.

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