Technology Blog by Victor Forde

XtremIO 4.0 was announced at EMCWorld 2015 in May and is finally GA this Tuesday June 30th. Much has been said about this impending release by none other than Chad Sakac, and EMC proper among others. Nobody can deny that XtremIO is the most successful product in the EMC portfolio in a long long time. In saying that there were two issues for me that continued to bother me and more importantly customers;

1.) Disruptive upgrade process for code upgrades and for scaling out to another Xbrick in the cluster

While the code upgrade process was addressed in previous releases (once inline compression feature was introduced) scaling out the XIO cluster meant a fork lift upgrade (lift the data off, expand cluster and restore data).

2.) Native Remote replication

Native Remote replication is a feature most EMC Customers immediately look for with the likes of VMAX SRDF or VNX with Recoverpoint. You could understand prioritising compression and snap ahead but not an easy discussion point involving the likes of Federated Tiered Storage to achieve it with VMAX or with VPLEX for Recoverpoint.

XtremIO 4.0 blows this all out of the water!

In terms of Scaling Out you can now scale out non disruptively to 8 Xbricks (or 16 Active-Active Controllers/Nodes) with Xbricks ranging in capacity from 10TB, 20TB and now with 4.0 40TB Xbricks. When Scaling out the XIO Cluster now auto-balances after expansion. The management GUI XMS can manage up to 8 Clusters now so scaling out in this release has been addressed in more ways than one.

In terms of Remote Replication with 4.0, Native remote replication is implemented with RecoverPoint Asyschronous replication with a unique snap based solution without the need for any RecoverPoint (array-based) splitter. The XtremIO snap based solutions implemented a SCSI DIFF api for RecoverPoint to issue the instruction to ensure to only take/replicate differential snaps across to target Site (after initial full sync for first snapshot). Coupling this with RecoverPoint’s write-folding, deduplication and compression capabilities means a significant reduction in bandwidth consumption. The current implementation is asynchronous with RTO of <60 seconds. The EMC vLAB demonstrating this technology integration is now available as well so reach out if you want to get hooked up with a demo. For those not aware what EMC vLab is and how it works I will post something on that soon for awareness.

Note: For those not aware, RecoverPoint is a well established Replication and Data Protection solution in the Industry with over 23K deployed and present in 85% of Fortune 200 customers but for those not familiar RecoverPoint brings with it Local & Remote (Bi-Directional) Protection and Point in Time recovery capabilities as well as fully integrating with VMware SRM.

While this post was meant to specifically allay any concerns (which I also had) on Fork lift upgrades and Remote replication I do want to mention briefly some enhancements to XIO snapshots as part of the 4.0 release hitting the streets June 30th as there are so many features included in this release these important updates could get missed. The unique in-memory, space efficient and high performance snapshots in XtremIO are best described here but below is a list of the enhancements in this release;

– Refresh and Restore capability (including to an existing snap as well as production volume)

– Snapshot scheduling

– Read Only Snapshots

– Consistency groups (or can be considered as snapshot sets)

– Read Only snapshots

There is an extensive list of features in XtremIO 4.0 as seen below.

I am sure you will see further posts from folk in the community as 4.0 goes GA and hopefully very soon we should be getting a demo unit in our office so hopefully more posts to follow on this topic from me.

Usual disclaimer folks