Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

This article is to share with you about the new features of XtremIO, the little monster of EMC. The editor thinks it is very practical, so I share it with you to learn. I hope you can get something after reading this article.

EMC XtremIO claims to be the fastest-growing product since EMC has "shit" and has a lot of architectural features. But its products are not perfect, for example, the upgrade to 3.0 software needs to migrate data (because of its data cutting from 4K to 8K), and the expansion of nodes can not be carried out online, there is no remote replication feature, and so on.

But this year, EMC will launch the biggest improved version since GA, XTREMIO 4. 0. In last month's EMC WORLD 2015, a special Session talked about these new features. Let's learn about them together.

First of all, new feature updates are mainly reflected in the following four aspects:

1. Performance, capacity and scalability enhancements

2. Enhancement of management interface and functions.

3. Enhancement of remote replication technology.

4. Data replication (snapshot) management enhancement.

Overall, EMC sees XtremeIO 4.0 as the biggest update since GA, with more than 50 new features and hundreds of enhancements.

These new features are as follows, but today we will only focus on the blue part.

First of all, the enhancement of X-Brick, the capacity and performance are greatly improved. As XtremIO supports re-deletion and compression, EMC believes that the overall data reduction ratio can be achieved at 6:1, making its space utilization greatly improved. According to Garter's statistics, XtremIO ranked first in AFA's revenue in 2014, while IBM's Flashsystem ranked first in capacity. It is mainly because XtremIO has higher storage efficiency and richer data services, so each TB flash memory can be sold at a better price.

The new feature supports 8 X-Brick clusters, or 16 controllers. This is already aligned with the high-end storage VMAX3.

Moreover, now the expansion of the node can be carried out online, after the expansion is completed, the system can be automatically balanced, free of debugging, and the practicability is greatly enhanced.

As XtremIO has become a key storage in the data center, it actually carries a lot of business, and the requirements for management have also increased. The new features have great improvements in the management function and interface. Support for multi-cluster management, support for Tag and reporting enhancements are the biggest changes.

Of course, in addition to GUI,REST API and CLI, which can automate management, it is also necessary. The enhancement of the report is that it can handle historical data within two years.

The addition of MAC support on the client is a boon to Apple fans.

A XMS management server can manage 8 clusters, which basically meets the requirements of centralized management of general enterprises.

As we all know, Gmail has a tag function, which makes it very convenient to manage email.

XtremIO also draws lessons from this idea, putting the stored resources on different Tag to facilitate search and management.

Through the enhanced reporting function, you can see almost everything you want to see.

Data protection, that is, remote replication, XtremIO has always been a solution. One is that VM-level replication can be done with VMWARE software, and the second is that it can cooperate with VPLEX to construct a dual-active solution.

However, with VPLEX replication, the cost is too high, and many all-flash startups support replication, what about XtremIO? Because of a 1 million IOPS system pursuing performance, it is very difficult to do remote replication without affecting performance as much as possible.

EMC solves this problem by combining XtremIO's memory snapshot with RecoverPoint replication. Currently, the RPO is less than 60s and supports interworking with other devices that support Recoverpoint.

Its working principle is different from the traditional Recoverpoint, the traditional RecoverPoint adopts the CDP mode of capturing each I _ Dot O to generate continuous logs, while XtremIO uses the way of taking a snapshot and then replicating it differently from the last snapshot in order to ensure performance. Because XtremIO uses memory snapshots, snapshots are taken faster, and replication can be unloaded to RPA devices. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is not XtremIO that supports remote replication. The advantage of this implementation is that it has less impact on performance, but it is still very different from VMAX's SRDF replication:

1. Recoverpoint support is needed to increase the cost of software and hardware. However, it is better than the old version, which needs to add VPLEX to do Recoverpoint.

2. In principle, only asynchronous replication is supported, not synchronous replication.

To clarify here, Watermelon previously thought that XtremIO has built-in remote replication function, which is wrong, replication still needs to add Recoverpoint devices (of course, it can also be VM form).

So this approach has all the advantages of Recoverpoint, including support for heterogeneity (other EMC products that support RP).

Because all the metadata in XtremIO is in memory, data replication is the most efficient and can be done in memory.

Performance and fast refresh and recovery are the biggest advantages of this mechanism.

From the perspective of XtremIO snapshot scheduling, XtremIO can make a snapshot at an interval of 15s, which meets the requirements of almost all users to prevent logic errors.

The refresh of the snapshot is also very convenient and does not even require a rescan because its SCSI ID has not changed.

Backing up snapshots to DATA DOMAIN can greatly reduce the impact on production volumes.

And the management function of the snapshot is more powerful, and it is closely integrated with the application.

XtremIO's ecosystem is also relatively complete, even supporting as a layer of VMAX3's FAST.X technology (not reflected in this film).

The latest addition is support for Microsoft ODX.

It can also be linked with Microsoft's VSS.

In addition to supporting a variety of critical applications, you can also combine Symantec and EMC's own backup software for snapshot backups.

All in all, EMC thinks XTREMIO 4. 0 is a huge step forward.

XTREMIO has never been better.

It seems that EMC is more satisfied with the new features of XtremIO. In fact, other vendors also do better than XtremIO, such as supporting HTML5 management, built-in support for synchronous / asynchronous remote replication, and so on. But EMC's MKTING ability and sales ability are too strong, therefore, XtremIO will and has become the biggest competitor in the AFA market.

These are the new features of XtremIO, the little monster of EMC. The editor believes that there are some knowledge points that we may see or use in our daily work. I hope you can learn more from this article. For more details, please follow the industry information channel.

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