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Ask the Expert: All About FLASH.NEXT
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Ask the Expert: VMAX All Flash – Extreme Performance at Petabyte Scale, and Best Practices |
Welcome to this exciting Ask the Expert event.
On March 5 we announce the exciting new server flash products. EMC executives, customers, and analysts will discuss these game-changing technologies and EMC’s vision for software-defined server flash on a Live web cast.
Following that this Ask the Expert event will be open and you can continue this conversation with our hosts about the details of the FLASH.NEXT announcement.
This discussion begins on Tuesday, March 5th and concludes on March 18th. Get ready by bookmarking this page or signing up for e-mail notifications.
Your hosts:
Avi (Avishek Kumar) is a Senior Product Manager in EMC’s Flash Products Division, focusing on EMC XtremSF and EMC XtremSW Cache. Prior to joining this team, Avishek was a Corporate Systems Engineer in the CLARiiON Hardware Engineering and Performance Engineering groups. Avishek holds an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Elad_Horn is a Senior Product Manager in EMC’s Flash Products Division, responsible for EMC XtremSW Cache. Prior to joining EMC, Elad managed database security products at Imperva and held various engineering and positions at Marvell and Intel. Elad holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from IDC Israel.
Mabro1
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March 5th, 2013 09:00
This event is now open for questions. We look forward to a fun and interactive discussion around FLASH.NEXT.
Thanks and regards,
Mark
RRR
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March 6th, 2013 02:00
Ok guys, although I was in the virtual announcement yesterday I had to leave the screen frequently, so in the end all I noticed were commercial words like "1 million IOps", "linear scalable" and stuff, but I need to dig into pdfs to make up my mind and come up with questions.
Can you provide me with some MUST HAVE notes, ppt or white papers so I can actually ask some questions? I won't bother you with questions about pricing, although some sort of a direction or hint about cost per GB is interesting.
Anonymous
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March 6th, 2013 06:00
Hi RRR, here are the launch slides and a link to the webast replay: https://community.emc.com/message/716998#716998
RRR
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March 7th, 2013 02:00
thank you, I'll dig in
RRR
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March 7th, 2013 02:00
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?
Kumar_A
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March 7th, 2013 06:00
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.
RRR
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March 7th, 2013 06:00
Cool
Anonymous
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March 7th, 2013 08:00
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:
Keep the great questions coming!
RRR
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March 8th, 2013 02:00
This is so cool! Thanks for the references, I'll make sure I'll pass the youtube vid around in our sales team
John_F_Kim
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March 12th, 2013 18:00
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.
Anonymous
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March 13th, 2013 05:00
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.
John_F_Kim
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March 14th, 2013 14:00
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?
Anonymous
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March 15th, 2013 14:00
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
Anonymous
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March 15th, 2013 14:00
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.
RRR
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March 18th, 2013 05:00
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.