This blog was written by Chhandomay Mandal,
Solutions Marketing Director for XtremIO
The growth story has been phenomenal for XtremIO. Earlier in the year, Josh mentioned about how XtremIO achieved $1B revenue run rate within one year of the first product shipment. We have more than 1,700 unique customers with over 50% of Fortune 100 companies running XtremIO in production today. In May 2015, Gartner published the All-Flash Array market shares and we came in first with 31.1%. More importantly, we gained 19 points of market share in one year and the second best vendor is over 11 share points behind us!
Oftentimes I get asked the reasons behind XtremIO’s wild success. There are many, but today I am going to focus on one that is dear to the CIO’s heart: Total Cost of Ownership or TCO.
XtremIO’s clean sheet design with innovative use of Flash technologies, advanced data services, unique copy data management coupled with automated self-service workflows for application administrators enable organizations to not only improve their infrastructure and application agility but also transform their businesses.
XtremIO’s performance, efficiency, and automation capabilities coupled with highly differentiated copy data management techniques allow for the consolidation of diverse tier-1 workloads and non-production copies, reducing infrastructure sprawl and management complexity. XtremIO can consolidate cloud, database, VDI, software development, mail server, and enterprise business applications that once required multiple, dedicated storage systems, lowering costs and providing both operational and business process advantages.
Recently analysts from the Enterprise Strategy Group studied the TCO and business impact of such mixed workload storage consolidation on XtremIO. They modeled a mid-sized software development company with $54M in annual revenue. The analysis compared the storage-related costs that could be expected when deploying siloed storage arrays to meet business requirements with those that could be expected to be paid if the company chose to deploy a consolidated solution on a single XtremIO X-Brick (Figure 1). ESG Lab also analyzed some of the additional economic business advantages that would be realized when deploying XtremIO instead of a traditional storage system. All assumptions of XtremIO business benefits used in the model were validated for accuracy through real-world XtremIO customer testimonials.
Figure 1: Traditional storage solutions vs. consolidation with XtremIO
The findings have been very enlightening. The study shows that consolidating traditional storage deployments dedicated for production, development, test, and VDI operations with XtremIO resulted in 3.8x lower 5-year total cost of storage ownership, with an average annual storage TCO savings of $561K (Figure 2). In fact, traditional storage’s TCA (total cost of acquisition) alone was same as XtremIO’s TCO over the period of study!
This included:
- 5.8X Lower Administrative Costs – achieved via a simple intuitive hardware and management interface design, streamlined operations that save time and steps, fewer systems to maintain, and more importantly the ability to optimize the creation and administration of development, test and production copies of data. This included:
- 98% less time planning for growth and resource optimization
- 68% less time monitoring and consolidating reports
- 68% less daily task system management time
- 67% less time planning application deployment and optimization
- 71% less time managing backups
- 79% less time servicing and installing components
- 88% less time managing copies of data (MAJOR TASK OF DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION)
- 6.0X Lower Power and Cooling Costs – Consolidating with XtremIO requires far less hardware thanks to intelligent design and great space efficiencies. XtremIO requires fewer controllers, enclosures, and disks while providing far lower latency operations.
- 2.2X Lower Support and Maintenance– Fewer systems to keep hardware and software support and maintenance contracts on. All features of XtremIO are included in the purchase price and nothing in the array is separately licensed. Furthermore, XtremIO’s Xpect More program keeps maintenance costs flat for seven years.
- 2.5X Lower Cost of Acquisition – The ability to consolidate workloads space efficiently with almost no impact to performance means that a single 20TB XtremIO X-Brick can consolidate the operations of 5 separate storage systems with dedicated functions.
Figure 2: 5-Year Storage TCO Analysis Results
But it doesn’t end there…
It’s not just about the Total Cost of Storage Ownership; ESG Lab’s analysis echoed the sentiments of XtremIO customers that storage consolidation with XtremIO can impact the bottom line of the business in many ways:
- Daily Analytics on Same Platform – XtremIO can perform business analytics on the same set of data as the production database while still providing sub-millisecond response time to existing operations. This means analytics do not have to be performed on a separate copy of the data located on a separate set of resources – allowing analytics to be run in real-time rather than on out of date extracts from production, thus providing faster insight to potential business advantages. [Examples: customer retention, upsell sales opportunities, operational efficiencies, lowering risk and fraud]
- Shorten Development Time of New Products – XtremIO space-efficient writable snaps enables Production, Development, Test/QA and Go-Live testing on the same device with the same high performance (50% quicker batch jobs in ESG’s analysis). This means developers and testers can work on up to date images of the production database with zero wait time, speeding the new product development cycle from 36 months to 24 months, generating revenue streams and growth a year earlier. This efficiency enables organizations to choose to produce faster with the same set resources, or reduce the number of resources required to produce a product in a given timeframe.
- Quicker Improvement of Existing Products – The optimized development cycle also result in streamlined operations for existing products. This means quicker product refreshes and feature additions with faster response to demands for bug fixes and security patches. This results in higher customer satisfaction and retention as well as competitive advantage and increased market share versus competitive offerings.
- Performance / Availability of Production DB – The predicable ultra low latency of database operations means a better user experience and faster time to insight – this helps retain customers and attract new customers who have had poor experiences. XtremIO can complete the rollback of a production environment instantly rather than minutes or hours without the need to reconfigure host connectivity. This means less impact to revenue generated through production operations.
All of these resulted in additional annual economic business advantage of $645K over the 5-year period of study (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Additional economic business advantages realized by deploying XtremIO
When added together, the ESG Lab model predicted that over a 5-year period, consolidating storage operations onto a single XtremIO X-Brick rather than deploying traditional storage systems would provide cost savings and additional revenues totaling $6.0M. Traditional storage-related costs would be reduced by $2.8M over the 5 years, while additional economic business advantages totaling $3.2M would be realized. Investment in an XtremIO solution would make sense to the software development organization with an expected payback period of only 8.9 months (based on storage-related costs only). If the additional economic advantages are considered, this payback period could be as low as 4.1 months. Figure 4 summarizes the results of the 5-year ESG Lab analysis.
Figure 4: Total expected 5-year economic impact of XtremIO solution with payback analysis
Needless to say, our customers across all segments and verticals enjoy similar TCO benefits and business impacts – this has been a cornerstone of our success story.
Get the XtremIO TCO study here for the thorough analysis conducted by ESG. Enjoy!
