EMC XtremIO

6a00e552e53bd28833019aff2b85a5970bWell It’s been a while since I posted  but I got some new exciting stuff to talk about!

We’ve purchased our first EMC XtremIO array!   The system is 2x 20T Xbricks which gives us around 30TB raw capacity.  Compression and dedupe brings us to around 210TB usable storage, this is based on a  7:1  compress/dedupe factor which is proving to be the standard for the current software.

 

The system comes in up to an 8 brick configuration:

emc-XtremIO-f2

 

What each X-Brick looks like racked:

Each X-Brick contains:

  • Eaton high quality UPS unit.
  • 2 Storage Controllers.
  • DAE enclosure sas connected to the Storage Controllers.
  •  Once you go to a 2 or more brick system you will have 2 48G infiniban switches connecting the storage controllers together.

 

Update 12/1/14

 

So we’ve had our array in production for about 8 weeks now.  I have nothing but good things to say, performance has been absolutely incredible and stability / reliability has been everything promised.

The storage controller servers are Intel chassis with dual power supply, dual infiniban controllers and dual sas hba.  They appear to be running some sort of E5 cpu and boast 256GB of ram each.

Inside XtremIO Storage Controller

 

The system is pretty busy once cabled up, the architecture is very cluster oriented so there is a lot of redundancy in the cabling.

Xtremio Xbrick Cabling

Some pictures for the front of the array/Eaton UPS.

EMC EATON XtremIO UPS

 

20141202_180648

We are currently running around 550 production virtual machines that service 7,000 customer servers.   We are averaging 350-400MB/s read/writes at 20k io day in day out.   We’ve seen well over 20GB/s transfers and over 200k iop.

Storage vMotion and VAAI actions are extremely fast and completed almost instantly.  At the current time our data reduction/dedupe ratio is around 2.5:1 but I believe this numbers inaccurate as the total amount of data in our datastores is much larger than it shows stored.  🙂

Some UI Screenshots of our environment:

 

XtremIO UI Bandiwdth

XtremIO UI IOPS

xtremioui3

The lights on the disks in the UI blink based on activity, pretty cool eye candy.