Nearly two years ago, Dell made headlines after it announced the monumental acquisition of storage giant EMC for the sum of $67 billion in cash and stock. The two companies had teamed up in the past to deliver a number of co-branded storage solutions such as the Clariion line of SAN devices. Now, Dell EMC has released the second iteration of its XtremIO product aimed at VDI environments into the market.
Dubbed the "XtremIO X2", Dell EMC has touted numerous improvements covering a range of areas, including:
- Performance: The company is advertising that the X2 will deliver 80% better response times relative to the prior model while remaining resilient during periods of high demand, such as boot storms and antivirus scans. Furthermore, according to the company's internal benchmarks, a single "X-Brick" can host up to 4,000 virtual desktops, increasing desktop density and driving down the cost per desktop.
- Data Storage Efficiency: Through the use of technologies including deduplication and compression, physical data storage utilization can be driven down significantly in-line and in real-time to avoid impacting performance or unnecessarily consuming available capacity. In Dell EMC's own testing, 4,000 fully cloned virtual machines consuming over 51TB of logical space were able to take up just under 1.4TB of storage after data reduction.
- User Experience: Boasting performance faster than physical desktops in terms of response, the X2 is also 25% faster in booting virtual desktops compared to its predecessor.
- Increased Scale: The XtremIO X2 also provides the ability to scale-up SSD storage in a single X-Brick to a maximum of 138TB while then also being able to laterally scale-out to a total of 8 X-Bricks for a total of 1.1PB physical capacity. The company claims that effective capacity rises to 5.5PB through the use of its "embedded storage efficiency capabilities."
- Simple Storage Management: The X2 now comes with a new HTML5 management console, which eliminates the need to install dedicated management apps and providing admins a convenient means to conduct provisioning and also assess system performance. Furthermore, management of the XtremIO X2 can be integrated with VMWare vSphere, enabling admins to "easily and natively protect and restore datastores, virtual machines or files within VMs." A video demonstrating the integration can be found here.
With cloud and virtualized solutions penetrating further into the enterprise along with the continued proliferation of faster solid state storage, the features and scalability of Dell EMC's XtremIO X2 may prove enticing for storage administrators.
Source: Dell EMC
