How much do you like your XtremeIO?

In a nutshell so far...

1. Performance and scalabilty is good.

2. Interface and the array is really easy  to use once everything is setup.

2. Reliability poor. The OS is buggy needs to mature. We pulled it from production.

3. The hardware needs to be simplified.

4. No NVMe so hardware upgrades are needed in the future to keep up with the maturing SSD landscape.

saj,hou,

Was this on the version 3 code or on version 4?

Can you explain what you mean on that the hardware needs to be simplified?

i am curious about #2 ...what's poor about it ?

Version 4.

Maybe I was spoiled with the other AFA POCs but the other AFA did not require all the cabling, less FC ports and actually had a smaller rack footprint than XIO did. Check the back of  XIO that is racked and up, looks like a sphagetti bowl. 

Not a deal breaker but longer set up times and maybe not as easy to troubleshoot connectvity issues. I think if EMC designs a chassis that can fit all the components of an Xbrick while being modular it would simplify the setup, expansions, upgrades and connectivity troubleshooting.

Some bugs restarted the XIO cluster automatically and brought us to halt during production hours. Needless to say it is not going back into production anytime soon.

It was a rare confluence of bugs and probably never will happen again but it did happen so I cannot tell the business it is reliable for production yet.

Thank you for your feedback. Allow me to comment on a few things that you have brought up.

We have come up with a cable management arm for XtremIO which will make the cables much more manageable on the back of an XtremIO array. Having said that, XtremIO is a scale out architecture with more components (more number of storage controllers, as an example) - so it is going to have more cables compared to an array which is based on a dual controller scale-up architecture. But the benefit is in the linear scalability, consistent and predictable performance that XtremIO can provide as you scale out in terms of the number of X-Bricks.

As for the other bugs that you ran into, we can help provide an ETA of those bug fixes if you dont have that already. Feel free to message me privately, since this is not the right forum to be discussing customer specific details. I hope you understand.

Avi wrote: Thank you for your feedback. Allow me to comment on a few things that you have brought up. We have come up with a cable management arm for XtremIO which will make the cables much more manageable on the back of an XtremIO array. Having said that, XtremIO is a scale out architecture with more components (more number of storage controllers, as an example) - so it is going to have more cables compared to an array which is based on a dual controller scale-up architecture. But the benefit is in the linear scalability, consistent and predictable performance that XtremIO can provide as you scale out in terms of the number of X-Bricks.

Avi, scale out is your excuse for the rats nest i see behing my XtremIO box ?  Talk to VMAX guys, they can tell you how to do scale out with prestine cable management that spans not only floor tiles but aisles.

It is not an excuse by any means. We do appreciate any and every feedback that comes in from our customers.

As I mentioned earlier, we do recognize that there is a scope for improvement and have come out with the cable management arm for new arrays that are shipping out now.

Being a new XtremIO customer with multiple vendors in the data centers. Some things to improve on reducing mess at the back:

1. Service Controllers, DAE can be combined together in one 4U box and cabling done internally/backplane. Reduces few moving parts behind the back.

2. Can we eliminate the BBUs and manage power failures differently ? That reduces some more cabling.

3. Can you ship right length cables for the customers so everything is neat and tight

Each time customer/vendor touches a cable behind the back for troubleshooting, it takes couple of hours to make sure system health is normal due to the cabling mess at the back. 

Very good points Anantha – thanks for sharing. I will make sure that the right folks see this feedback

This is not the correct forum to discuss our roadmap, but we do appreciate reaching out to us with your feedback.

A lot of good points have raised.

Any update about getting rid Java, being now Firefox is going to end support of Java Plugins?  I think IE 11 is the only thing that will be supported in another year that will have Java support.

Not having NVe isn't that big of deal yet,  but I guess they could release a new model that would have NVe instead SSDs at some point.

I'm a current single VMAX customer and we are using all 16 FC ports going to the SAN switches, and Recoverpoint appliances ports too. 

Thanks for the feedback and sharing your requirements. We are working on the issues that you have raised, but I would recommend working with your EMC account team to get more details about the timelines. As I mentioned earlier, this is not the right forum to discuss roadmap items.

Anantha - more specifically on the last two points:

Re: "Can you ship right length cables for the customers so everything is neat and tight"

You should be getting the right length cables if the array was shipped after mid-2015. Is that not the case with you? Can you share more details about what length cables you were shipped with?

Re: "Each time customer/vendor touches a cable behind the back for troubleshooting, it takes couple of hours to make sure system health is normal due to the cabling mess at the back"

This should also be resolved with the new cable trays that we have been shipping since mid-2015. Can you share more details if that is not the case?