Dell EMC XtremIO Flash Review

Originally posted at vcdx133.com.

Today I completed the initial performance testing of my EMC XtremIO PoC system. I wanted to take a shot at it myself before the EMC SMEs come in to tune and optimise the configuration. In a single word, “Wow!” This is the first time I have witnessed 400,000 IOPS in any kind of enterprise lab. I look forward to seeing what additional tricks the experts can make my “X-bricks” perform.

Business Requirement for XtremIO

I can imagine people reading this and asking, “Why? It is so expensive!”. Well, the organisation I work for uses monolithic storage (EMC Symmetrix VMAX) which has been sized for capacity, and after 2 years of use we are feeling the impact of performance degradation as we consume the total capacity of the solution. My business requirement is to create a small but powerful “High Performance” cluster of compute, network and storage that will provide low latency, high I/O resources for my business critical applications that are currently suffering. This XtremeIO PoC is an attempt to meet that business requirement; I am also seriously considering hyper-converged infrastructure and server-side flash-cache acceleration as well.

Iometer Test Configuration

• 3 x HS22 blades with 2 x 4C Intel Xeon X5570 2.9GHz CPU, 96GB RAM and QLogic HBAs per blade running ESXi 5.5 Update 2 (Boot from DAS)
• IBM BladeCenter Chassis with Brocade Switch modules connected to XtremIO chassis with 6 x 8Gb FC
• IBM BladeCenter Cisco 1GE Switch Modules connected to Core switch network
• EMC XtremIO X-bricks version 2.4.1 with EMC XtremIO Storage Management Application version 2.4.1
• 8 x 1TB Volumes (Encryption enabled) mounted as VMFS-5 Datastores with VMware NMP set to “Round Robin”
• 8 x Iometer Dynamos running on Windows Server 2008 R2 with 3 x 40GB vDisks connected to Paravirtual vSCSI Adapters (1:0, 2:0, 3:0)
• 1 x Iometer Manager running on Windows Server 2008 R2
• Test 512b, 4K and All-in-one Access Specifications (Two variants: 100% Read 0% Random, 0% Read 100% Rand)

Iometer Test Results