Compare XtremIO vs. Unity all-flash storage system for VDI

#Dell sells two all-flash storage platforms that target #VDI workloads: #DellEMC #Unity and Dell EMC #XtremIO #X2. Unity is a midrange storage platform for small to medium-sized businesses, and XtremIO is an enterprise-scale platform for organizations with large VDI deployments.

In May 2016, EMC introduced the Unity platform to replace its aging VNX systems. Several months later, Dell acquired EMC, and it has since expanded the Unity product line by adding four additional all-flash platforms: Unity 350F, 450F, 550F and 650F. These arrays are faster and more efficient, and they support larger capacities than either the VNX systems or the earlier Unity models.

Dell offers Unity in several forms. The first is the purpose-built physical platform, which you can configure with all-flash drives, or in a hybrid setup that includes a combination of flash and traditional hard disks. An all-flash storage system delivers the best performance because it offers higher I/O rates and submillisecond response times.

The second form is the Unity Virtual Storage Appliance (UnityVSA), a software-defined storage product for consolidating hardware resources. You can download and use the UnityVSA Community Edition for free, or you can go with the subscription-based Professional Edition, which includes technical support and can handle larger capacities. Both editions require that you install UnityVSA on a VMware ESXi host.

Unity also comes as part of a Dell EMC VxBlock System 350 or Vblock System 350 converged infrastructure. With this option, you can take advantage of the Unity all-flash storage system and get a package that simplifies your VDI implementation.

The Unity platform primarily targets VDI implementations with fewer than 500 virtual desktops, but you might be able to support up to 2,000 nonpersistent desktops -- as long as your VDI deployment stays nonpersistent. Persistent virtual desktops require significantly more storage.

http://searchsolidstatestorage.techtarget.com/tip/Compare-XtremIO-vs-Unity-all-flash-storage-system-for-VDI

7 Questions to Ask at Dell-EMC World

Next week is the first #EMCWorld since #EMC was assimilated into #Dell, and if you are one of the storage faithful making the annual trek out to Vegas, you are probably already coming with questions. This first #DellEMC World is a great opportunity to really get a sense for whether the new Dell-EMC is the storage company that deserves your business for the next decade. #DellEMC, #Compellent, #Isilon, #VCE, #VMware, #VSAN, #Vmax, #VNXe, #Nutanix, #DSSD, #XtremIO, #VxRail

While you likely already have your own questions, if we were going to Vegas, here are the ones we’d ask:

1. #XtremIO vs. #VMAX – which is the real Tier1 bet?  
EMC’s strategy for Tier1 block has been inconsistent and confusing, at best.  If you were at EMC World in 2014, you probably got the distinct impression that VMAX was over and XtremIO was the future (anyone remember the $1M guarantee?), but just two years later there was nary a mention of XtremIO with all the attention on the new All-Flash VMAX. And sales reflected this shift. According to IDC, XtremIO sales were down -27.7% year-over-year in 2016, as EMC pivoted focus back to VMAX, realizing perhaps that selling retrofit flash was easier than maturing their purpose-built all-flash platform.  What will 2017 bring, and where should your investment go?

 

2. #DSSD – what happened?

For the past two years at EMC World, DSSD was touted as the next big thing, promising an “order of magnitude improvement” and “insane low latency.”  Michael Dell even called DSSD “a game changer” a few months ago at Dell World. Unfortunately, it was storage for the 0.01% – expensive, exotic, low on scale, and non-existent on software data services. Abruptly, last month, DSSD appears to be gone (at least as a stand-alone product). The go-forward plan is to apparently integrate DSSD NVMe technology into other EMC products, which one has to imagine means another retrofit coming for VMAX. Meanwhile, if you want affordable NVMe today, that’s non-disruptively backward compatible with the products you previously purchased from Pure, we have youcovered.

 

3. #XtremIO #X2 – Can you get there from here?
Industry rumors seem to indicate that a new “X2” version of XtremIO is coming.  It’s time. XtremIO is really, really due for a hardware refresh as the core hardware hasn’t substantially evolved since GA in 2013. Even XtremIO’s spec sheet is pushing 2 years old. The X2 story has been an interesting one, as the marquee feature seemed to be native file integration, as publicized at Dell World, and regularly tweetedabout by the XtremIO team. Then a few weeks ago, news surfaced that project was halted. As we contemplate new XtremIO hardware, questions about upgradability come to mind, as such issues have plagued XtremIO customers in the past. In a world where customers still can’t mix 10, 20, and 40TB X1 bricks in a cluster (is that really scale-out?), will existing X1 customers even be able to adopt new X2 bricks? Will X2 support NVMe flash capacity? Will the move to X2 be non-disruptive and will customers be able to trade-in X1 bricks for X2 bricks? Since XtremIO’s GA, Pure has shipped three generations of FlashArray hardware, 12 software releases, and introduced NVMe flash capacity, all non-disruptively and fully-upgradable. This is the new standard.

 

4. #VNX vs. Dell #Compellent (vs. #Nutanix vs. #vSAN) – which is the mid-range bet?

Things get even murkier at the mid-range.  First, assuming Dell will eventually consolidate into one mid-range platform, choosing between EMC Unity and Dell Compellent is a non-obvious choice. Both Compellent and VNX/ #Unity are large, multi- $100M businesses. Compellent has a solid user base in Dell, but hasn’t been ultra-aggressive about retrofitting for flash. Unity, on the other hand, is a new reincarnation of VNX/CLARiiON with a flash focus and (allegedly) a new codebase. We’re not sure you should bet the farm (er, cattle ranch) on it yet. Meanwhile – there’s a bigger skeleton in the strategy closet – hyper-converged. It would seem that Dell needs to consolidate product lines to re-pay debt, and as a server company, maybe hyper-converged looks like a good bet for these Tier 2 / Tier 3 and smaller customer workloads? If you read Chad Sakac’s blog – that certainly seems to be Dell’s strategic direction. Leading analysts have encouraged Dell EMC customers to seek written guarantees that their selected product isn’t facing a near-term end of life. If your Compellent or VNX array is up for refresh, there’s never been a better time to push to understand Dell’s go-forward strategy before you make another 3-5 year investment.

 

5. Nutanix? #VCE #Vblocks?  How long will Dell resell multiple competing products?

Dell has always been nothing if not pragmatic – focused on whatever product drives sales vs. squabbling over who invented it. In fact, this pragmatism led to years of relatively peaceful resale of EMC VNX by Dell in the 2000s. But, Dell also knows that long-term customer relationships matter, and OEM products are not the path to long-term customer loyalty. So it’s instructive to look at what happened to that VNX resale deal. Eventually it was dissolved, Dell tried to acquire 3PAR and eventually did acquire Compellent to replace it (and amusingly, Dell is once again facing the Compellent vs. VNX choice). Fast forward to today, and there are two very obvious “inconvenient partnerships” in the Dell product lineup – reselling Nutanix (in competition w/ VMware vSAN) and selling VCE Vblock solutions with Cisco servers and networking, in competition with Dell servers.  How long will these  last?  If I were a customer who wanted Nutanix, I’d buy it directly from Nutanix.  If I wanted hyper-converged from Dell, I’d buy #VxRAIL.  And if I was a customer running a lot of VCE, I’d be really questioning the long-term roadmap of that stack.

 

6. #IsilonNitro – Ready for Prime Time?

Last year at our //Accelerate conference, Pure introduced FlashBlade – putting NetApp and EMC’s Isilon on notice that the world of high-performance storage for unstructured data was about to undergo some major disruption. Just a few weeks later at EMC World, EMC announced a competing product – Isilon Nitro. Nitro was so new, in fact, that it didn’t even make an appearance at EMC World on stage “in the hardware” – with EMC just showing some bezel renderings. Well, we can confirm that Nitro does in fact exist (we’ve competed with and beaten Nitro head-to-head in a few accounts already), but these first few Nitro encounters lead us to believe that the product is still early. It’s a year later, plenty of time to go from announcement to GA. We’ll be looking forward to hearing about Nitro customer adoption, roadmap and how much work was done to rewrite Isilon’s OneFS for flash vs. just another retrofit.

 

7. Does the storage fire still burn strong?

Finally, a softball question, but perhaps the most important one. Storage is all about trust. Trust that your vendor will have your back, trust that the support team rocks, trust that your relationship is valued, trust that the product you are betting on will have another decade of investment. So as you head to EMC World, it’s a great opportunity to feel out EMC leadership, both business and technical. How excited are they? How dedicated are they? Are they pumped-up for the next decade of innovation under the Dell family?

http://blog.purestorage.com/7-questions-to-ask-at-dell-emc-world/

Fujitsu has its own line of storage boxes, so, uh, why is it reselling XtremIO in Japan?

Why is #Fujitsu touting all-flash #XtremIO storage arrays in Japan when it has its own #Eternus all-flash array product line? The Fujitsu business unit doing this is Fujitsu Managed Infrastructure Services (FMIS). Could Fujitsu say why it is doing this please, and whether other Fujitsu regions will start reselling XtremIO products? A Fujitsu spokesperson told us: "As a provider of end-to-end technology products, services and solutions, Fujitsu Managed Infrastructure Services contracts will include support for products from third parties, such as those from #DellEMC." Is it likely to spread from Japan to other geographic regions? The spokesperson said: "In the domestic Japanese market, Fujitsu provides end-to-end services for large customers, including the purchase of third-party products like XtremeIO – it is strictly for this market only due to the specific nature of the corporate customer business." We asked how the XtremIO arrays are positioned alongside the Eternus all-flash storage products. The response said: "Fujitsu has its own full line-up of Eternus storage systems, which compete with those from Dell-EMC. In fact, we are seeing very favorable response to the recently launched Eternus AF250 and AF650, with a growing number of customers agreeing that they are a perfect alternative to Dell-EMC's XtremIO and Unity products. You can expect more all-flash products from Fujitsu later this year offering extreme I/O scalability." In effect, it seems to us, if the customer prefers XtremIO over Eternus AFAs in Japan and only in Japan, then FMIS will work with that preference.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/14/why_fujitsu_resells_xtremio_in_japan/

2016 – the year 3D XPoint came down to earth from Planet Hype

Storage Review in 2016 Storage in 2016 saw its on-premises #SAN /filer array heartland assaulted by the public cloud on the one hand, and #hyperconverged and #softwaredefinedstorage on the other. The now-classic dual-controller disk array went hybrid to keep storing primary data, but all-flash arrays are taking on that role and so the hybrids went all flash too. High-end monolithic arrays saw newcomer Infinidat make roaring progress as it took share with its low-priced and highly available #InfiniBox array. Secondary data was sucked off more and more to object storage, which itself saw a mass adoption of S3 as the preferred interface, leaving mainstream disk and hybrid arrays storing relatively less and less on-premises data. The public cloud growth was unstoppable, with AWS out ahead, followed by #Azure and #Google, and then by #Oracle and #IBM – the only on-premises storage suppliers with public cloud service ambitions. The 451 Research group forecast public cloud storage spend to double in two years – with #NetApp, #HPE and IBM moving down the supplier rankings as Amazon's AWS and #Microsoft 's Azure clawed their way up. Hyper-converged infrastructure was a storage hot point, with #Nutanix having a successful IPO and powering ahead to lead the market. #Cisco, #DellEMC, #Lenovo, and HPE made hyper-converged products move as suitability for sales of servers inside a combined server, storage and networking sell exploded. Product Births There were notable product introductions: Dell EMC's #DSSD unit announced its #NVME-accessed and NVME drive-using D5 array. Dell EMC re-engineered its #VNX and #VNXe arrays to produce the Unity line. Dell EMC introduced an all-flash Isilon scale-out filer. #Cisco introduced its #HYPERFLEX hyper-converged system, and it introduced a storage server version of its #UCS line. Primary Data started shipping its DataSphere storage silo-converging product. SpectraLogic announced the biggest, baddest, largest tape library in the world – the TFinity ExaScale edition, with 1EB of capacity and support for LTO, IBM and Oracle formats. Amazon went into physical storage with its Snowball 80TB hard disk drive enclosure transfer to its public cloud from customer data centres, and its 100PB Snowmobile trucked shipping container of storage. One notable non-event was Dell EMC's converged systems business deciding not to change vBlock servers from Cisco UCS products to Dell PowerEdge ones. The most intriguing startup was Brian Ignomirello's Symbolic IO, which claims its technology runs database queries 60 times or more faster than other systems – even XPoint-using ones – through a different way of coding stored data and processing it. Micron flash storage exec Rob Peglar joined Symbolic IO as its CTO during 2016, giving it additional credibility. Acquisitions Dell and EMC was the big event, a $67bn acquisition by privately owned Dell that saw storage industry legend Joe Tucci retire, and David Goulden's EMC Information Infrastructure business unit become the Dell EMC server, storage and networking organization. Michael Dell is now an entrepreneurial IT colossus alongside Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. Load Dynamix and Virtual Instruments merged after VI ran into revenue growth problems. Load Dynamix investors provided $20m additional funding for the resulting Virtual Instruments company. The new company believes its ability to capture production workload profiles (via Virtual Instruments technology) and replay them in a test lab (Load Dynamix technology) will speed problem identification and resolution. Virtual Instruments then bought hybrid cloud and virtualisation performance management technology business Xangati in November. IBM bought object storage supplier CleverSafe and promptly put its software in the IBM public cloud, gaining first place in the object storage market. All-conquering Nutanix bought VMware memory cacher PernixData at a price that we were told caused Pernix VC funders to take a hit in their investments. Disk drive manufacturing boss WDC bought SanDisk and its assorted flash technologies and products. Hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) vendor GridStore bought DCHQ, renamed itself HyperGrid, and now delivers hyper-converged infrastructure-as-a-service (HCIaaS). The DCHQ tech, among other things, containerises existing traditional applications. HCIA vendor Pivot 3 bought Nexgen, a flash array business with QoS technology, after it was spun out of SanDisk. Cavium bought HBA and vendor QLogic in June and started making noises about NVMe over Fibre Channel. Storage and Ethernet networking supplier Brocade bought Ruckus Wireless for $1.5bn in April as it looked for a new growth avenue. This walk up wireless avenue was itself overtaken when Broadcom bought Brocade for $5.9bn in November. This signalled the end of the three standalone storage networking suppliers: Brocade, Emulex and QLogic. All three were acquired by larger, more broadly based businesses. The Fibre Channel SAN market was not big enough to support them. Deaths All-flash array pioneer Violin Memory threw in the towel after a long and tortuous struggle with continuous loss-making quarters, a reverse stock split, NYSE ejection threats and then an ejection. It applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December. The misguided VC of the year award goes to Art Samberg, chairman and president of Pequod Capital, who bought 5.3 million Violin shares in June, before the NYSE expulsion, when they were trading at $0.62, implying a cost of $3.3m. They are now, in Violin’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy state, listed as worth $0.0462, implying a value of $245,000, a loss of around $3m. You win some, you lose some, eh Art? Flash and storage supplier X‑IO – think ISE products – closed its Colorado Springs manufacturing operation and laid off employees in May. There is some hope that its technology, specifically its NVMe Axellio tech, might find a home somewhere. X‑IO had never become the success that financial backers Seagate and VC Oak Capital had wished for. Crossroads sold its loss-making archiving products to StrongBox Data Solutions of Canada and is now focussing on patent licensing. Quantum shut its Symform sync and share business down in June. A non-death event was XtremIO, where rumors of its coming downgrade relative to all-flash VMAX inside EMC were strenuously denied, and the addition of file storage capabilities to XtremIO revealed later in the year. At the CEO level: Hyper-V-focussed hyper-converged system vendor Gridstore ejected CEO George Symons in April. Chairman Nariman Teymourian eventually replaced him. Cloud storage gateway supplier Panzura changed its CEO from Randy Chou to Patrick Harr. Chou is now CEO and co-founder of cloud-based, security-as-a-service startup Nubeva. Mangstor CEO Trevor Smith was replaced by Craig Gilmore, who impressed the hell out of Mangstor's founder and board, despite having no storage technology experience. But then neither did ex‑CEO Trevor Smith, we were told. Qumulo CEO and co-founder Peter Godman transitioned to a CTO role as Bill Richter was recruited to be the new CEO and President. Triumphant Veeam co-founder and CEO Ratmir Timoshev stepped down, with William Largent taking over. Ejections and divorce EMC sold its content management business – think Documentum, etc – before its acquisition by Dell was consummated. Hopefully the new owner can turn this under-performing mongrel into a fresh puppy. Symantec separated from Veritas by selling Veritas to the Carlyle Group, so confirming what virtually everybody knew: that it had failed to integrate the Vertitas storage products after buying it originally, with its security business, and there was no synergy between storage and Symantec's notion of security. Imation's storage businesses were sold off by the owning Clinton Group, leaving an investing business behind. The Memorex trademark went in January with Nexsan's sale to private equity organised in December. With proactive ownership and a re-energised exec roster, Nexsan could grow in 2017. Alliances HPE invested $10m in object storage vendor Scality in January. Cisco invested in hyper-converged system software startup Springpath then introduced its Springpath-powered Hyperflex hyper-converged appliance and started a big push into the HCIA market. Lenovo set up an alliance with Juniper to build converged, hyper-converged and hyper-scale data centre infrastructure products. It also partnered with numerous HCIA vendors: think #Nutanix, #Pivot3, #SimpliVity, #Atlantis and #Maxta. It allied with Nexenta so its servers could run NexentaStor software, and partnered with Nimble Storage and its arrays. Pure Storage and #Cohesity agreed on a deal for Cohesity to provide converged secondary storage facilities behind #Pure 's primary storage flash arrays. #SanDisk allied with #RedHat so that red-hatted Ceph could run #SanDisk 's #InfiniFlash flash-filled enclosures. So far InfiniFlash, with selling deals with #Nexenta and #Tegile, has not set the world on fire. VC funding Where did the storage VC money go in 2016? #Objectstorage and S3‑compliance evangelist Cloudian raised $41.3m in a D‑round. Security and file-sharing cloud storage gateway supplier CTERA raised a $25m E‑round. Datera raised $40m. #Datrium and its server-powered storage ran a $55m C‑round. NVDIMMer #Diablo Technologies raised $37m in a C‑round – and got itself a new CEO. DriveScale raised a $15m A‑round. End-point protector and file sharer Druva raised $51m in an E‑round. NVME-accessed array startup E8 had a $12m B‑round. All-flash array SW developer Elastifile drew in $35m in a B‑round along with a Cisco investment. Gridgain had a $15m B‑round. Hyper-converged appliance supplier Gridstore had a $19m C‑round. NVMe-accessed array startup Mangstor raised $5m in a C‑round; relative peanuts for a hardware/software startup's third round. Carbon nanotube memory startup Nantero ran a $21m F‑round; productisation taking a long time. Cloud storage gateway and data services supplier Nasuni raised $17.5m in an E‑round plus $7.5m venture debt financing. Flash endurance tech startup NVMdurance went through a $2.23m A‑round. NVMe-accessed array startup Pavilion Data Systems had a $15m A‑round. HCIA and flash array supplier Pivot3 raised $54.6m in a G‑round with bank funding. Scale-out filer startup Qumulo raised $32.5m in a C‑round. Secondary data silo-converging and data protecting #Rubrik raised $61m in a C‑round. Hadoop and RDMS combiner Splice Machine raised $9m in its C‑round. Velostrata had a $17.5m B‑round. Software replicator Zerto raised $70 million in its E‑round. That list represents a total of half a billion, $581.67m to be exact, in funding we know about that was pumped into startups and pre-IPO storage companies in 2016. That's not a great year with around $1.8bn being invested in 2013, over $3bn in 2014, and some $1.8bn in 2015. This is a significant reduction. We figured a golden age of storage startups was coming to end in an article in September. IPOs Nutanix ran its IPO in September and it has been judged a success. Its shares opened at $26.00 and are now trading at $26.86. In this IPO game that's a success, by the way. Pure Storage IPO'd in October 2016 with an opening price of $17.00 and shares now trade at $11.15; way to go Nutanix. Magneto-resistive RAM startup Everspin filed an IPO in September. Think of MRAM as a kind of specialized XPoint-class non-volatile memory that doesn't have the potential application or marketing drive that XPoint possesses. Everspin IPO'd in October with shares starting at $9.10. They are now worth $7.84, having risen from a low of $6.33 in late October. Tech developments All-flash arrays became mainstream, with every incumbent vendor either bringing out new-design flash arrays (EMC DSSD, HDS A‑Series) or retrofitting SSDs or flash modules to existing arrays. Nimble Storage completed its pivot to all-flash arrays with a successfully introduced product. NetApp's all-flash FAS proved popular. Pure Storage is the only all-flash array startup to make it to IPO so far and has remained a top-four all-flash array supplier. Indeed, it opened up its second major product line in March with FlashBlade, a rack-scale system using proprietary storage blades, for storing unstructured data. Pure's triumphal 2016 was marred only slightly by having to pay its way out of a Dell EMC lawsuit over IP. Interestingly, Toshiba announced its FlashMatrix competitor to FlashBlade in August. This is an Atom CPU-powered realtime, scale-out, compute-plus-flash analytics engine. Toshiba has yet to announce how it will come to market, meaning channel, and there was no pricing or availability information at its launch. NVMe-over-fabrics, with its server storage stack-bypassing RDMA technique, could be the last major technology development for on-premises array connectivity. Many startups focussed on the area; Apeiron, E8, Excelero, Mangstor and Pavilion Data Systems for example. Virtually all the incumbents said they would support the technology, including old-timers HPE and NetApp, and newcomers Kaminario, Tegile and Pure Storage. Dell EMC's DSSD unit introduced its D5 NVMe over fabrics-accessed array. The fibre channel HBA suppliers said they would support NVMe over Fibre Channel, providing an installed base upgrade path. Server operating systems and applications need to transition to NVMeoF – a clumsy acronym – and the impetus behind that should strengthen in 2017. SSD density-increasing 3D NAND became mainstream as well, with WD (SanDisk) and Toshiba on the one hand, and Intel and Micron on the other following Samsung's lead and shipping product. Intel announced its 3D NAND SSDs in March. SK Hynix also has shipping 48-layer 3D NAND product and is developing 72-layer technology. Toshiba and others started talking more about QLC (4bits/cell) flash technology as a possibly affordable solid state archive medium, where its low write endurance would not matter. Toshiba briefed attendees at the Flash Memory summit on a 100TB QLC SSD idea. Even China has its own plans to enter the 3D NAND manufacturing area, having been rebuffed when trying to buy Micron and invest in Western Digital. DataCore dominated the SPC-1 benchmark with its Parallel IO software and just blew the price-performance numbers away; sub-$50k DataCote x86 servers trouncing $1mn-plus mega storage arrays, and showing storage array IO waits had large CPU wait components as IO stack processing hit CPU bottlenecks. Oracle SVP Chuck Hollis said the SPC-1 benchmark and DataCore's tech was irrelevant to real IT life. DataCore's chairman said that was just sour grapes. Latecomer Seagate finally entered the helium-filled drive era in January with a seven-platter 10TB disk. It said it would ship 12TB helium drives for testing later in the year, with 14TB ones in its roadmap. Toshiba, the third disk drive supplier, did not introduce helium-filled drive technology, confirming it will be a capacity laggard. However, such drives might arrive in 2018, assuming Toshiba can get over the multibillion-dollar hit of its Westinghouse nuclear power plant projects in the USA, without re-planning disk drive investment schedules, or indeed selling its disk drive business. Seagate says brand new heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives will appear in 2017, with HAMR replacing perpendicular magnetic recording. Think 16TB initially? Infinidat sees 20TB disk drives on the horizon. Just to show what it can do, Seagate filled a 3.5-inch drive enclosure with flash to produce a 60TB demo SSD. It's a startling idea but the cost would be prohibitive, any other SSD maker could easily do the same thing, and it basically seems like face-saving technology because Seagate is a bit-player in flash and needs to do much, much more. A partnership with SK Hynix has been rumoured but nothing has been said publicly by either company. Our sense is that if Seagate chairman and CEO Steve Luczo doesn't get Seagate a proper flash strategy and chip supply partnership then toastdom threatens. To add ignominy, Seagate's Kinetic disk drives, Ethernet-accessed drives with an object storage capability, sputtered without catching fire, while Igneous and OpenIO rejected Seagate's tech and introduced their own products, each plugging an ARM-based micro-server onto 3.5-inch disk drives. We'll see how they do this year. Object storage made steady progress throughout the year, with HPE investing in Scality, Dell renewing a Scality OEM deal, and WD HGST unit introducing a new 14PB archive array. With Dell buying EMC then that organisation has in-house object storage technologies to measure against Scality's RING and 2017 might see a shakeout there. As with its Nutanix OEM deal though, the level of customer demand could prove to be the deal's saviour – or the opposite. IBM leapt to the top of IDC's object marketscape charts following its late 2015 acquisition of CleverSafe. The software is being used in IBM's public cloud and this, together with its FlashSystem are highlights of what has been the now-traditional decline in IBM's storage hardware revenues throughout 2016. However, IBM did put a new executive in charge of storage and he, Ed Walsh, might make visible changes in 2017. Hyper-converged infrastructure was the dominant storage story in 2016. Nutanix's IPO was part of that. Dell EMC with VSAN, ScaleIO and VxRail/VxRack was the number-two vendor, and straining every one of Chad Sakac's sinews to overtake Nutanix. But it didn't get there and, indeed, Dell decided that the combined Dell EMC should carry on selling the OEM'd Nutanix XC system; customer demand was that important. HPE launched its gen 2 hyper-converged product in March. It launched the even newer (gen 3?) HC 250 and HC 380 systems in December. SimpliVity added Hyper-V support in April. Even NetApp started talking about a hyper-converged system it was developing. HPE is preparing for servers with enhanced and persistent memory capabilities, with Machine-developed technologies on the one hand and non-volatile flash and XPoint or ReRAM components on the other. It introduced a ProLiant server using power fail-protected Micron flash DIMMs in March, and the Machine project was splashed all over a customer event in November. HPE's Memristor technology seems as far away as it ever was, particularly with HPE Labs boss and Memristor evangelist Martin Fink retiring, and HPE signing a partnership with SanDisk over ReRAM. Our sense is that flash DIMMs are still an early stage technology with no great server IEM wins by, for example, Diablo Technology. Our sense is that non-volatile DIMMs are going to be an XPoint-driven technology and not a flash-driven one. Faster 32Gbps Fibre Channel, doubling 16Gbps FC speed, was introduced smoothly during the year but its impact was muted by the gathering enthusiasm for far faster array access using RDMA techniques and also by the rise and rise in virtual SAN-using hyper-converged systems. The concept of Container storage flourished with, for example, NexentaEdge providing storage for stateless Docker containers. Portworx provided persistent storage for containers as did StorageOS and also Hedvig. But, by and large, storage for containers is still an early-stage technology with no clear winners. 3D XPoint had a poor year it has to be said, with continued denials by Intel that it was a variant of phase-change memory (PCM), and a drip feed of performance data that fell a long way short of the grandiose claims a year earlier that it was 1.000 times faster than flash, etc. Intel tried to escape this trap by saying it was talking about raw media speed but, having set the performance, density and endurance bars so high, its original marketing now looks to be hysterical and quite alarmingly inaccurate or imprecise. Whatever the reasons XPoint NVMe drives now don't look so far in front of everything else as to render ReRAM or PCM drives pointless, and XPoint DIMMs, if using DRAM caches like flash DIMMs, won't be that far ahead of flash DIMM performance. We should see actual product this year and will get a better view then. So far, though, XPoint is marketing hype, and Intel and its partner Micron, have to show that their Optane and QuantX products actually merit the hype. Parallel IO was promoted by DataCore and Data Domain. Bridgeworks pushed its TCP/IP networking parallelisation technology with radical transmission time shrinkage when TCP/IP is used for replication with, for example, NetApp SnapMirror. And finally Backup software supplier Veeam had an excellent year with revenues surging ahead. Both Barracuda and Commvault recovered from revenue dips by responding to customers wishes for public cloud-based protection and also for appliances. HPC storage supplier Panasas had a so-so year, with several exec departures early on. Teradata had problems. Tegile chopped a few staff in February, and so too did Atlantis as well as Data Gravity; Paula Long's startup succumbing to financial gravity pressures. Late in the year NetApp laid off several hundred people as part of its efforts to grow again. Veritas also went through a pink slip exercise in December. The on-premises SAN/filer heartland is now in the midst of an all-flash transition for primary data and vendor revenue growth looks to be primarily about taking share from other vendors rather than greenfield site sales. The ways of doing this include better analytics, faster flash and better hybrid (public-private) cloud support. HCIA vendors, secondary storage silo convergers, storage SW-only suppliers, cloud storage gateway file sharers and protectors, and object storage suppliers all see the classic on-premises SAN/filer array as a big, fat, dumb, complex and complacent carcass they can collectively rip to shreds. But there is hope for the SAN and filer suppliers. The key to its survival is dragon-slaying, with the two primary dragons being hyper-converged infrastructure and the public cloud. With product enriched by all-flash and scale-out technology, by NVMe drive and fabric access, by better QoS and analytics, by object storage linking and public cloud back-end access, it can offer a better-than-public cloud storage experience overall and beat HCIA deployments as well. At scale, shared storage is a better bet than hyper-converged storage. As long as the HCIA vendors are trapped by that perception then modern SANs and filers have a chance. But if the HCIA vendors show they can support large scale deployments and the public cloud suppliers continue surging then the on-premises SAN/filer outlook is bleak. See you this time next year to see how things turn out. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/the_year_3d_xpoint_came_down_to_earth_from_planet_hype/

Why Flash is Poised to Kill Disk for Primary Storage

It’s a little known fact that 2016 marks the 60th anniversary of the first commercial usage of hard disk storage. Hard disks have been happily spinning in data centers across the world ever since; a fantastic run by any measure, but one which is looking ever more likely to be nearing its conclusion – at least for most primary data storage use cases. There’s no denying that flash media is on its way to becoming the dominant technology in primary storage. According to one report by research and advisory community

Wikibon, the age of the disk-dominated data center could be over in less than a decade.

Wikibon claims that the amount of flash memory shipped as production storage will reach parity with hard-disk storage by 2020 with flash ending over 30 times greater by 2026.

There is strong evidence behind #Wikibon ’s claim. In November 2013, #EMC ’s #XtremIO entered the all-flash array market, claiming third place after only six weeks. Within six months, XtremIO had catapulted into the lead and is the fastest growing product in EMC’s history with a market share lead nearly three times the nearest competitor. This year, EMC shifted the focus of its entire primary storage portfolio to all-flash, including the well-regarded #VMAX and recently-introduced mid-range Unity product lines.

Flash is now the recommended default for new purchases in the primary storage space and likely for converged infrastructure systems as well. As the pace of change continues to build, it’s time to dispel any residual myths and misunderstandings once and for all.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/enterprise-it/storage/flash-poised-kill-disk-primary-storage/

Extend vROps Monitoring with Dell EMC XtremIO

#BlueMedora is excited to announce the release of the Blue Medora #Dell #EMC #XtremIO Management Pack for #vRealize Operations to give you more visibility into the intersection of Dell EMC XtremIO storage and the virtual layer. With the management pack, you can dive deep into the performance of your storage workloads. Following are four key ways you can enhance your monitoring with Dell EMC XtremIO. Gain insight into performance, like throughput and latency Understanding throughput, IOPS and latency for key XtremIO layers, like volumes and disks, can help you optimize the performance of your Dell EMC XtremIO workloads. With access to more than 1,000 metrics, the management pack from Blue Medora makes it easy for you to track essential throughput and latency metrics.
http://blogs.vmware.com/management/2016/11/extend-vrops-monitoring-dell-emc-xtremio.html

Dell EMC XtremIO shatters customer and revenue growth records

#Dell #EMC today announced that the #XtremIO All-Flash Array (AFA) has surpassed another set of customer and revenue milestones, with EMC (now part of Dell EMC) further solidifying its position as the All-Flash market leader, amassing a 40% revenue share according to IDC, nearly 2.5x its nearest competitor. Since its November 2013 debut, XtremIO sales have continued to outpace every competitor, accumulating more than 3,000 customers and US$3 billion in total sales in less than three years, further validating its market share leadership and place as quite possibly the fastest-growing enterprise storage product ever.

http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/dell-emc-xtremio-shatters-customer-and-revenue-growth-records-902382

EnterpriseDB becomes Advantage-level Dell EMC partner

#EnterpriseDB (EDB) has announced it has become Advantage-level partner in the #Dell #EMC Technology Connect Partner Program, meaning its produces have been validated for use with Dell EMC platforms. The company explained it has tested its EDB Postgres Advanced Server database on the EMC #XtremIO all-flash scale-out array and tested the EDB Postgres Advanced Server on DSSD D5 to offer customers more flexibility when choosing their hardware and database platform. These joint solutions will prove particularly useful for companies looking for scale and performance to run their mission-critical workloads, Lenley Hensarling, senior vice president of strategy and product management at EnterpriseDB, said.

http://www.channelpro.co.uk/news/10189/enterprisedb-becomes-advantage-level-dell-emc-partner

Dell EMC's making XtremIO multi-protocol

#EMC ’s #XtremIO all-flash SAN is getting a file-system injection thanks to Dell Fluid File System ( #FluidFS ). #Dell EMC previewed the NAS capabilities for XtremIO at Dell EMC World, saying they would be generally available by late 2017. FluidFS is a scale-out NAS technology that Dell acquired from #Exanet in 2010 and used to add file capabilities to its Compellent and #EqualLogic SAN arrays. But even before Dell acquired EMC for more than $60 billion, the development teams from XtremIO

EMC’s XtremIO all-flash SAN is getting a file-system injection thanks to Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS).

Dell EMC previewed the NAS capabilities for XtremIO at Dell EMC World, saying they would be generally available by late 2017. FluidFS is a scale-out NAS technology that Dell acquired from Exanet in 2010 and used to add file capabilities to its Compellent and EqualLogic SAN arrays. But even before Dell acquired EMC for more than $60 billion, the development teams from XtremIO and FluidFS – both based in Israel – were collaborating on their integration.

Chris Ratcliffe, Dell EMC senior vice president of core technologies, jokingly referred to the joint development as a “black ops” operation. The integration will add NFS, SMB, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and NDMP to XtremIO’s current Fibre Chanel and iSCSI block storage support.
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/Dell-EMCs-making-XremIO-multi-protocol

EMC XtremIO Boosts Banking System Performance & Improves Customer Satisfaction for C-Edge Technologies

#EMC Corporation, a leading storage solutions provider has successfully reduced data center footprint for C-Edge Technologies Ltd., a leading technology and infrastructure service provider to financial institution. The solution- EMC #XtremIO is packed with unprecedented performance, data reduction capabilities, integrated copy data management, and extraordinary ease of setup and use. The Indian banking sector has been growing rapidly in the last two to three year and hence there is a huge volume of data involved in this endeavour. The company was finding it increasingly difficult to manage capacity needs and to achieve the fast, predictable system performance their customers were demanding. To stay on top of the competition and maintain competitive edge in fast-changing marketplace, the company needed a long term IT capacity planning to proactively meet business needs for infrastructure resources. To achieve its business objectives, C-Edge Technologies decided to partner with EMC and make the transformation to EMC XtremIO and has successfully reduced the data center footprint and power consumption by 10 X enabling them to store 60 TB of data in just about six TB of physical space.
http://businesswireindia.com/news/news-details/emc-xtremio-boosts-banking-system-performance-improves-customer-satisfaction-c-edge-technologies/49747

BridgeHead integrates with EMC XtremIO All-Flash Array for improved healthcare data backup and recovery

Healthcare data management vendor #BridgeHead Software announced on Tuesday its integration with all-flash storage array #EMC #XtremIO. For more than 16 years, BridgeHead has collaborated with EMC to bring ideal technologies to its healthcare customers and #BridgeHead will continue to support new emerging technologies that peak in the market. EMC’s fastest-growing product of all time, XtremIO, helped EMC reach more than 40 percent market share in Q4 2015 and topped the all-flash storage array market in nine months after its 2013 debut — notably for its ease of use and unique architecture that delivers consistent and predictable performance at scale.

http://wwpi.com/2016/08/02/bridgehead-integrates-with-emc-xtremio-all-flash-array-for-improved-healthcare-data-backup-and-recovery/

FUD XtremIO heading for the bin? Total BS, thunders CTO Itzik Reich

Storage industry jungle drums heard by El Reg suggest #EMC is axing #XtremIO product line development and putting it into maintenance mode due to scalability and data availability issues. EMC vehemently denies this, saying it's absolute FUD. Three independent sources say XtremIO is headed for a maintenance-only retirement home. One says the killer problem is that XtremIO memory cannot scale in line with #SSD capacity. Another says there is an availability issue. One source told us: "I've heard they are putting XtremeIO into maint' only. No more development, will phase it out over Unity. How they do their metadata is too much of a challenge and they can't do larger drive sizes because of it. Also very high profile customers had massive failures that resulted in data loss – dedupe table corruption – and it's caused them to pull the plug on it." Our industry insider continued: "EMC is cutting development efforts and putting XtremIO in maintenance mode. Will not push it in the market as hard as they have and will focus on other products. In practice it will get no more development effort and other products will take over the market."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/21/xtremio_product_line_future/

VCs: Can't see an IPO or acquisition for your startup? Don't throw in the towel

There surely must be an alternative to the two preferred exits for VC-backed startups – IPO or acquisition – in these times of near-VC funding drought and what seems like IPO fatigue. It used to be simple: build a storage startup that could take money and customers from the mainstream vendors, sit back and wait for competitors to come running with open wallets or bankers singing songs of IPO riches. Acquisition was more certain and we have seen round after round of acquisitions. In no particular order: #EqualLogic, #3PAR, #Compellent, #DataDomain, #CleverSafe, #Storwize, #TMS, #XtremIO, #DSSD, #SolidFire, and many more. IPOs in the storage space have been fewer, and many have been problematic. #ViolinMemory is still fighting the problems that came with it to its IPO. #Nimble Storage has had its hiccup. #PureStorage still has everything to prove and has had a mini-hiccup. #Nexsan tried and tried again for an IPO and was eventually acquired by Imation, where it is now the core product line. #Nutanix has filed for an IPO but delayed it. Why is the storage IPO scene such a troubled one?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/19/the_third_way/

Another win for SanDisk as CloudByte sinks teeth into InfiniFlash

#SanDisk has won another #InfiniFlash OEM, in the shape of enterprise and cloud storage provider #CloudByte.

CloudByte's #ElastiStor software has networking and enterprise storage facilities and uses the InfiniFlash IF100 all-flash enclosure, with its MLC flash, as a high-performance/high-capacity storage resource.

CloudByte ships its ElastiStor ESA-A1000 pre-configured to support a specified number of applications or VMs, to which it offers a guaranteed quality of service.

It said its on-demand performance provisioning means customers "can easily scale to thousands of applications and meet their most challenging performance demands".

The feature list includes:

Secure container-based isolation
QoS capabilities that guarantee IOPS, bandwidth, and latency
Scalable to multiple PBs
Storage management from a single pane of glass
Ability to reallocate storage resources on the fly
CloudByte joins #Tegile as an InfiniFlash OEM and #Nexenta as SW-only storage running on InfiniFlash.

It will be interesting to see how enterprise customers react when faced with a choice between ordinary all-flash arrays, such as those from #Pure and #XtremIO, and InfiniFlash-based systems.

Another interesting choice will be between InfiniFlash-based arrays and #Solidfire all-flash systems, which also major on quality-of-service for cloud-style use cases.

As soon as InfiniFlash sales become significant SanDisk is sure to want to tell everybody, so silence will not be golden in this case. Tegile wins against Solidfire, if they happen, might also galvanise Tegile into telling everyone about it.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/cloudbyte_sinks_teeth_into_infiniflash_sandisk/