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Dell EMC XtremIO Review

This is the first time I have witnessed 400,000 IOPS in any kind of enterprise lab.

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

**Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Last updated: May 17 2015

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1 Comment

it_user213546 (User with 1,001-5,000 employees)

Rene,
Great review did you alter any of the hosts setting IE round robin and queue depth. This will help bring down the latency times dramatically.

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24 June 15

Author

it_user234747

Practice Manager - Cloud, Automation & DevOps at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Twitter vcdx133

Highlights

The program is very stable.

The solution's most valuable features are the inline data reduction and deduplication.

The solution's most valuable feature is its high performance.

I like the deduplication and auto-tiering features.

We've seen great enhancements from the performance point of view. There's good availability, stability, and continuity, but the performance actually has increased by 60 or 70%.

The most valuable features are that it is fast and reliable.

We mostly use it for backup, because we cannot measure anything, and we are afraid to use it for surveillance systems. We were planning to use it for mostly for surveillance systems.

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