"effective capacity"
BURN IT
EMC touts X-brick's hit house: 320TB all-flash cluster and XtremIO v4
EMC has doubled the capacity of its XtremIO all-flash array X-bricks – and increased the cluster count taking it up into higher-performing application areas. X-brick raw capacity doubles from 20TB to 40TB while the cluster node limit rises from six to eight, meaning there are 16 N-way active controllers. The previous maximum …
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Monday 4th May 2015 20:33 GMT Mr.Nobody
recoverpoint = 150% additional storage required - more money for EMC
Recoverpoint is a very cool technology, although its far more than most people require for their environments. The best part about it for EMC is that you need to purchase more that twice as much as your current capacity requirements to have a local copy, plus more storage for all the writes you want to keep point in time backups of. If you want to use recoverpoint for just remote copies, you don't need twice as much, but any other vendor's similar technology doesn't have this requirement, you can just make local clones without that full duplicate set of storage.
And add to that that you need enough IO to satisfy all these copies to maintain good performance, and its a solution that gets very expensive and complicated as it grows. Granted, with SSDs you don't have to worry about IO too much, but if you already have an environment that is very dependent on latency and high UI performance, this could matter a bit.
And recoverpoint is crazy expensive without all the extra disk required for local copies.
At least they finally have a flash product that you can replication on - albeit a very expensive and complicated one.
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Monday 4th May 2015 22:37 GMT @storagesavvy
Re: recoverpoint = 150% additional storage required - more money for EMC
True that RP requires both a clone and a journal, but that journal gets you DVR functionality for your data..
In the case of XIO, RP is more targeted at remote replication, providing both the remote replica and a gold copy with less overhead than keeping a gold copy clone at the target site.
For local protection, XIO has already supported snapshots which have zero storage overhead and are created instantaneously. The 4.0 release adds snapshot rollback and other enhancements to the existing snapshot functionality.
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Monday 4th May 2015 22:54 GMT unredeemed
Re: recoverpoint = 150% additional storage required - more money for EMC
If you think RecoverPoint requires 150% additional storage, you're doing it wrong. Rule of thumb is to start at around 20% of capacity for your journal volumes. But that can vary based on change rate and retention.
A proper sizing and realistic understanding of your data is all that is needed. A blanket 150% sounds like fodder a competitor would spew.
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Tuesday 5th May 2015 13:14 GMT Mr.Nobody
Re: recoverpoint = 150% additional storage required - more money for EMC
Its based on experience with using recoverpoint with Clariion/VNX/DMX products.
If the new version uses the snapshots inherent to the array itself for local recovery, that's great, but the version of recoverpoint for the products I listed above require a full lun for a local copy of the prod data for local recovery if you want to make clones you can use for other purposes.
And yes, the 50% is based on how long you want to keep those point in time roll back bookmarks, and what the change rate is. Its also highly recommended that you put the journal disks on fast RAID 10 disks so as to not adversely impact performance. Very costly and in fact more than 50% if the environment is using RAID 5 for the prod data.
I pointed out in my post that Recoverpoint is great technology, it just not simple, and in its previous iterations, not inexpensive or efficient. Sounds like EMC is making it a bit better with the x-bricks. Huzzah.
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Tuesday 5th May 2015 09:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: recoverpoint = 150% additional storage required - more money for EMC
Working for the vendor in question and knowing the product pretty well, some thoughts:
Suggest to do a proper sizing in this case :-) Having local and remote copies, and keeping all that stuff for a prolongated time will have its cost.
The overhead compared to simple replication is mostly depending on how long you want to keep the journals (e.g. being able to roll back to what point in time).
Important when talking XtremIO/RecoverPoint combination: The solution does work with snap-shipping, the journal only stores some metadata but not the changes. Means it will only be minimal space. It also does not involve a write splitter, which lowers complexity. All in all a very decent solution, primary goal of which was to have a very flexible replication solution that does not impact the performance and latency of the flash storage.
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Tuesday 5th May 2015 09:47 GMT Man Mountain
"With a 6:1 data reduction ratio, the effective capacity of a fully packed cluster is 1.9PB." ... why not claim even higher. It's like going to the bookies and saying I'm going to bet on the higher odds horse so I can win more. There's a reason the odds are higher! Anyone using 6:1 to arrive at their effective capacity is heading for a fall!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
