Ask the Expert: All About FLASH.NEXT

This event is now open for questions. We look forward to a fun and interactive discussion around FLASH.NEXT.

Thanks and regards,

Mark

Hi RRR, here are the launch slides and a link to the webast replay: https://community.emc.com/message/716998#716998

thank you, I'll dig in

I have a question about the "inline data reduction" in the XtremeIO: is this 100% true dedupe? Or a sort of dedupe (best effort) that works well if workload is low and less dedupe when the workload is high? I almost can't imagine that the inline dedupe really can keep up with very extreme workloads, or can it?

RRR - inline deduplication in XtremIO is "truly" inline and always ON. What this means is that this feature (along with other features like thin provisioning) are always ON and you do not have an option to turn it OFF. In fact, the more deduplication the array does, the more performance benefit you see from an application point of view.

This happens because deduplication has been baked in the software design of the array and is not a "add-on" feature that would potentially impact the array's performance.

Cool

RRR,

Avishek already responded but I thought I'd add some more.  XtremIO is the ONLY array in the market that has truly inline data reduction.  Other vendors who claim to have it can only perform some operations inline (as you pointed out) when the array is not very busy, and will switch off data reduction entirely when the array is processing moderate to heavy I/O loads.  Others don't have any kind of data reduction and others have post-processing.  This leads to very unpredictable performance.  Why are you buying a flash array?  For high levels of predictable performance! 

Furthermore, inline data reduction in combination with other capabilities (for example, VMware VAAI integration and memory-based metadata management) allows the XtremIO array to do some very cool things that nobody else can do.  For example, if you clone a virtual machine in vCenter, no data needs to be copied.  It's already on the XtremIO array, so a few pointer references created in memory are all that's needed.  Thus VMware provisioning tasks are extraordinarily accelerated - cloning VMs takes only a few seconds and doesn't consume and back-end IOPS on the SSDs in the XtremIO array.

Here's a demo of this amazing capability in action:  XtremIO Data Center Scale Virtualization Demonstration - YouTube

Other facts about data reduction on XtremIO:

• It's global - it takes place over all volumes on the array and across all nodes in the scale-out cluster
• It's distributed - the data reduction engine scales-out, so all nodes in the cluster share the workload evenly.  There are never any hot-spots or bottlenecks
• It works across all time - it doesn't matter how long ago a block was stored.  If it comes in again it is removed inline.
• It improves performance - since duplicate data is never written to flash, the IOPS on the SSDs are available for additional unique data.  XtremIO actually gets faster when more duplicates are seen.
• The entire array is dedupe-aware - data in the array's DRAM cache is also deduplicated which works wonders for things like VDI boot storms.  Features like snapshots and VAAI and more stuff coming in the future leverage the data reduction engine.

Keep the great questions coming!

This is so cool! Thanks for the references, I'll make sure I'll pass the youtube vid around in our sales team

Looking through the slides, I am impressed with what EMC announced for the XtremIO Array. Definitely more value-add than "just another generic flash array."  On the XtremSW Cache and XtremSF hardware, I'd like to point out that EMC VMAX can monitor XtremSW Cache when it's accelerating LUNs on the VMAX. Looking forward to seeing more integration between VMAX and the XtremSW and XtremSF products.

John, this is definitely a direction we're following. We will be adding this summer deeper level of integration with both VNX and VMAX platforms, that will include improved management capabilities from the arrays as well as improved performance when coupling XtremSW and XtremSF with an EMC array. Reminding that the Xtrem Server Flash solutions are storage agnostic, and will work well with any array out there. They just have even more functionality with an EMC arrays on the backend.

Elad, Does XtremSW Cache management software have specific advantages when operating with XtremSF hardware vs. other server-side flash cache cards?  That is, other than the XtremSF hardware being very fast?

Hey everyone!  If you want real-time answers to your questions, join us on Twitter this Monday, March 18 from 1pm to 2pm (US Eastern) for a TweetChat - #EMCATE event.  Avishek and I will be taking questions about XtremSF, XtremSW Cache, XtremIO, and other components of the recent FLASH.NEXT announcement.

On Monday, join the conversation with the hashtag #EMCATE or visit http://tweetchat.com/room/EMCATE. 

For more details, visit this page: https://community.emc.com/events/1892

John, XtremSW Cache works only with XtremSF today.  However, with the next release, it will work with any PCIe Flash card.  We are currently looking for beta customers for this use case.

Other than performance advantages, the primary advantage of using XtremSW Cache with XtremSF is that customers have a single vendor to go to for support.

it's in my scheduler, but the time is a bit inconvenient for me. So I might be following it on twitter, or not, it all depends whether I'm home on time.