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This article is about what the IDC analyst specifically mentioned about the EMC XtremIO iCDM solution. The editor thinks it is very practical, so I share it with you. I hope you can get something after reading this article. Let's take a look at it.

Mentioned in IDC's AFA MarketScape, the biggest feature of EMC XtremIO is its unique iCDM (Integrated replication data Management) solution. Today, let's learn what is unique about it.

CDM (COPY DATA MANAGEMENT) has always been a difficult problem in the industry. According to the analysis of IDC, the amount of replication data of enterprises is much larger than that of production data, accounting for more than 60% of the total, and the global cost is as high as 44 billion US dollars.

Especially for key database applications, typically each application has 5-12 copies of data.

In order to reduce costs, enterprises can only store these copies of data in layers.

But this brings great management challenges to the enterprise. DBA wants more copies, real-time, and better performance, but it is difficult for the IT department to meet its requirements, and management pays special attention to cost.

At present, there are four commonly used CDM methods. One is to do full cloning, the second is to use traditional snapshots, the third is to copy only part of the data, and the fourth is to use third-party CDM tools. Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in general, it is difficult to reconcile the contradictions among developers, operators, and management. Third-party CDM tools, such as startup Cohesity, are popular now because they provide ideal CDM solutions. But third-party CDM also brings new purchase costs, and it is troublesome to resynchronize with production data.

Snapshots are an approach adopted by many enterprises. But the traditional snapshot will have new problems in the FLASH environment. In a general hybrid system, the slice of the data is 128K-1GB, but the FLASH system is usually 4-8K. That is, the AFA system, whose granularity is finer, has a higher proportion of metadata. In traditional snapshots, each snapshot needs to copy a copy of metadata, resulting in rapid growth of metadata.

And because the metadata is too large to store all of it in memory, this can also cause performance problems.

For example, if a database needs 16 copies, it needs to retain 16 pieces of metadata, and the amount of metadata is too inflated. Moreover, the metadata is too large, and replication takes time, affecting the speed of taking snapshots, even with ROW.

The integrated CDM (iCDM) launched by XtremIO is better to solve the above problems. ICDM is divided into four layers, which will be explained separately below.

First of all, the bottom layer is the consistent performance scale out architecture provided by XtremIO itself, which ensures that the performance of each data copy is consistent when the system is re-deleted and compressed all the time. This solves the key performance problem of CDM.

The second layer is the snapshot function of XtremIO. Now the unified publicity of EMC is called XVC (XtremIO Virtual Copies). Since all of XtremIO's metadata (fingerprints) is in memory, fast implementation is lossless.

Snapshots can be refreshed instantly and support any direction.

The most important point is that in addition to the data can be shared, the metadata (that is, fingerprints) is also shared. That is, to make a copy of the snapshot, there is no need to replicate the data or metadata.

The performance of XVC is much better than that of traditional snapshot.

Therefore, in addition to long-term backups that require secondary storage (such as Data Domain), logical backups can be done with XVC. That is, XVC is sufficient only for the prevention of logic errors.

Of course, since it's called CDM, not snapshots, management is essential. So the third layer of iCDM is the automation and orchestration of applications. ICDM integrates a free EMC AppSync data protection software to achieve this feature, providing on-demand, scheduled snapshot creation, as well as automatic deletion of expired snapshots.

The last layer, that is, the fourth layer is application self-service. AppSync also provides a self-service portal that allows application administrators to manage their own snapshots without the involvement of storage administrators.

It is precisely because of XtremIO's unique two-tier memory metadata architecture, coupled with its snapshot technology that does not need to replicate metadata (fingerprint), to ensure the performance and efficiency of data replication, coupled with the automation and self-service capabilities provided by EMC AppSync, so that users no longer need to buy third-party CDM tools, but can meet the needs of developers, operators and managers.

These are the EMC XtremIO iCDM solutions specifically mentioned by IDC analysts, and 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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