Welcome to Las Vegas! What better place for EMC to make a friendly million-dollar bet with our XtremIO customers!
Today, EMC announced the “XtremIO $1Million Guarantee.” The first customer to demonstrate that their XtremIO system inline data services have switched off, been throttled back, post-processed, or deprioritized (even for one moment) gets one million bucks. We will also be announcing a “Rescue Program” to make it easier for users of competing flash arrays to switch over to XtremIO.
We are throwing down the gauntlet because we believe no other enterprise flash storage vendor has an all-flash array designed to live up to the task.
XtremIO has an incredibly unique architecture, one that delivers data services like global deduplication in real-time, and which completely avoids a process that is truly the bane of the all-flash industry. It’s called “System Level Garbage Collection.”
Sound grungy? It is.
Competing all-flash arrays are highly susceptible to this “garbage collection” state as they continue to utilize hard-drive based array design technologies such as log-structured file systems.
XtremIO arrays, conversely, are 100% designed for flash and contain a very unique combination of content addressing, a sophisticated metadata model, and flash-specific data protection algorithms, which in combination allow XtremIO to completely avoid this process.
Why should you care?
When an array goes into garbage collection state (which is a common occurrence in production settings), latency times can spike way up – many times beyond their normal ranges, and even into the hundreds of milliseconds — much more than the latency times for spinning disk drives.
An unfortunate side effect is that the array tries to compensate by throttling back — or switching off — data deduplication. Like a blow to the head, this further taxes the system with increased write rates that can last for days before the array returns to its normal state. Capacity consumption can balloon until the array fills up, causing applications to come off line. Ironically, all this typically occurs when the array is at its busiest and needs to deliver its highest performance rates—which is why users deploy flash in the first place.
More detail on XtremIO’s unique architecture and the issues competing arrays face can be found here.
What it all boils down to, however, is that XtremIO all-flash arrays are the most consistent and predictable performers in the market – with data services that stay online and inline100% percent of the time. No loss of deduplication and no System Level Garbage Collection—ever. No other flash vendor can make that claim.
So to our customers, we essentially say “do what you may to your XtremIO array —we’re confident it will stay inline.” To users of competing all-flash arrays, we say “keep your fingers crossed,” and please consider our Rescue Program—we’re here to help.
EMC’s XtremIO $1Million Guarantee begins now and runs till September 30, 2014. Complete details and guidelines can be found here.
