In my last blog about XtremIO Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM), we looked at WHY database, application, development, and infrastructure teams need a new option to consolidate workflow copies and finally solve the business process agility challenges around them. Now I’d like to look briefly at WHAT customers are getting from iCDM and HOW the XtremIO iCDM stack enables it. And we’re delighted to announce our little holiday gift for all XtremIO customers: free bundled AppSync to further enable your application teams!
WHAT?
iCDM is a unique new approach for integrating full copy data management capabilities natively with the array and integrating production and non-production copies together—for the first time—for critical use cases like dev/test and new use cases like on-demand analytics. With XtremIO’s scale-out all-flash architecture combined with in-memory metadata virtual copies, such consolidation has no SLA risks and is insanely space-efficient. And when XtremIO customers deploy iCDM, truly magical things happen 1) at the business process level, 2) at the infrastructure level, and 3) at the TCO level.
Let’s look at one example: IDC just published a case study of a Fortune 500 manufacturer that consolidated their SAP and Oracle landscapes to accomplish extraordinary application performance and business process benefits, on 1/16th the infrastructure footprint. iCDM enabled just-in-time manufacturing and inventory decision support business processes with on-demand analytics through:
- 9x faster batch processing and ETL run times
- 75% faster self-service times to provision copies
Beyond these impressive metrics, IDC goes on to explain business and operational impacts:
The XtremIO snapshot implementation has completely changed the company’s thinking on how to leverage copies to improve analytics, customer support, test and development (test/dev), and data protection processes, significantly improving both IT administrator and developer productivity to help lower costs and run operations more efficiently… When clones can be created instantly with no space consumption and retained and used with no performance impacts, people come up with all sorts of ways to use them to make their lives better.
Finally, both IDC and ESG independently confirm the dramatic TCO benefits of all this, with typical payback for the cost of the array in under 9 months.
HOW?
XtremIO allows customers to accomplish this Holy Grail of copy consolidation and management. Unlike other storage platforms – including other all-flash arrays and CDM software solutions, XtremIO offers the complete iCDM stack:
You can’t consolidate multiple Tier 1 SLA workloads and their non-production copies safely without a bulletproof, consistent scale-out IOPS and latency platform. You can’t mix production and non-production copy operations unless they are in-memory with no performance impact and free (only new compressed blocks require any capacity! We call these XtremIO Virtual Copies). But that’s just at the array level- database and application teams need application-consistent copies and CDM orchestration/automation—we provide this with our proven AppSync solution integration. Finally, the ultimate is true self-service—with no more SLA or capacity risks, why not allow database, application, and development teams to make their own self-service copies? When customers make this powerful shift, these teams want their self-service through their current preferred management tools like Microsoft System Center or SAP LVM, and of course REST API scripting. Only XtremIO enables all of this.
Why can’t other all-flash arrays do this? Check out what happens to the production database when other vendors apply archaic redirect-on-write or copy-on-write snapshots vs. XtremIO Virtual Copies. This shows IOPS and latency impact on the production instance when non-production copies are created every hour for 8 hours:
Seeing is believing:
Oracle iCDM Dev/Test Copy & Refresh Demo
And Now for Your Holiday Gift: Free AppSync iCDM Starter Bundle* With Every XtremIO: Our AppSync software is a critical enabler in the iCDM stack for true application integration and orchestration for Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, and VMware environments. And now we’re bundling it with every XtremIO (with free downloads for existing XtremIO customers) as our newest breakthrough data service.
Happy Holidays!
For More information:
XtremIO Integrated Copy Data Management Data Sheet
Kevin Closson’s Oracle iCDM Blog
Oracle iCDM Dev/Test Copy & Refresh Demo
* AppSync iCDM Starter Bundle is a full-featured standard AppSync solution that supports up to 20 simultaneous mounted copies per array (and unlimited unmounted copies)