Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a certified car nut. When I was in engineering school I thought I would work in the automotive industry (but that’s another story) because I had such a strong appreciation of design and performance. I have an affinity for two types of cars; supercars (Ferraris, Lamborghinis) and powerful sedans (BMW M5, AMG Mercedes). What astounds me about the latter category is that when executed well they provide nearly the same performance as the supercars, but have room to seat four, comfortable luxury amenities, return better gas mileage, and all around are more practical and easy to live with in nearly every situation. They’ll even give the supercars a run for their money at the occasional track day. In fact, they are so good that one should really question why you’d ever buy a supercar. I can think of only a couple of reasons. The first is design. Supercars are indeed beautiful. The second is outright performance. If you need to eek that last tenth of a second off your lap time, the supercar is the way to go. But in nearly every conceivable real-world situation, the powerful sedan is the better choice.
Flash storage products on the market today are analogous to supercars. They’re fast and sexy, but expensive and impractical for most use cases. Just like supercars, you sacrifice many features and amenities in the pursuit of ultimate performance. In fact, we hear many customers tell us that the only reason these products have been deployed is because they were the only option in the market. Imagine a world where your car options were limited to a Toyota Camry or a Ferrari. Ferraris are awesome, but they’re not affordable, utilitarian, or comfortable to drive most of the time. In today’s storage world, if you need more than Camry performance, you have little choice but to buy a Ferrari flash storage product.
At XtremIO, we don’t believe you should have to make this type of tradeoff. In fact, we believe that you should expect far more from your flash storage array than what is on the market today. Our storage system is analogous to the BMW M5 or AMG Mercedes – packed with amenities, tons of performance, and easy to live with in a wide variety of use cases. In fact, we’re even better in two ways. First, if you want Ferrari – or even Formula One performance – our system easily scales to deliver it and more. Our scaling is so powerful it actually goes far past Formula One performance and is more akin to having a fighter jet. Second, our technology is so efficient that you don’t have to pay a huge premium in order to get it. After all, fighter jets, Formula One cars, Ferraris, BMWs, and Mercedes are more expensive than a Camry. XtremIO’s flash storage array is total cost of ownership competitive with the disk arrays you already own. To sum up, you get any level of performance you need, all the enterprise storage features you expect, a system that is easy to live with day to day, and capabilities that simply don’t exist in other storage systems. I’ll be writing more about that last statement in future posts.
If the automotive industry delivered better than Formula One performance with the features and amenities of a luxurious sedan, AND with the price, economy, and reliability of a Camry, it would forever alter the landscape of the business. XtremIO is leveraging flash to deliver just such a step function in enterprise storage. You literally can have it all. If you think this sounds too good to be true, I strongly encourage you to register for our Early Access Program and try XtremIO for yourself. Fair warning – you won’t want to give it back.
