XtremIO is the new all-flash array from EMC, announced not too long ago. Flash has an enormous performance advantage over traditional spinning disks. Although there are no moving parts in a solid state drive, they can still fail! Data on the XtremIO X-Brick will still need to be protected against one or multiple drive failures. In traditional arrays (or servers) this is done using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). We could simply use RAID in the XtremIO array, but SSDs behave fundamentally different compared to spinning disks. So while we’re at it, why not reinvent our approach of protecting data? This is where XtremIO XDP comes in.
XtremIO
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The storage market has gradually been using more and more flash to increase speed and lower cost for high I/O workloads. Think FAST VP or FAST Cache in a VNX or SSDs in an Isilon for metadata acceleration. A little bit of flash comes a long way. But as soon as you need enormous amounts of flash, you start running into problems. The “traditional” systems were designed in an era where flash wasn’t around or extremely expensive and thus simply weren’t designed to cope with the huge throughput that flash can deliver. As a result, if you add too much flash to a system, components that previously (with mechanical disks) never were a bottleneck now start to clog up your system. To accommodate for this increased usage of flash drives the VNX system was recently redesigned and is now using MCx to remove the CPU bottleneck. But what if you need even more performance at low latency? Enter EMC XtremIO, officially GA as of November 14th 2013!