CJ Desai
SVP, Emerging Technologies Group, EMC
Today we are proud to announce the general availability of our XtremIO All-Flash Array. This is a huge milestone, not just for EMC, but also for the future of the virtualized datacenter. While it is simple to think of XtremIO as “EMC’s All-Flash Array” I’d like to share with you why it is so much more and what led EMC in May 2012 to purchase a small start-up based in Israel without a shipping product.
EMC saw something very powerful in XtremIO – its architecture. Silicon Valley these days is abuzz with web-oriented companies that can rapidly prototype their products and make constant changes in real-time as they measure customer response to their products. Enterprise storage, on the other hand, must be stable and trustworthy as a platform upon which a business can operate reliably for years to come. It’s a challenging problem to tackle and start-ups pursuing this market often make critical mistakes. XtremIO’s team, however, was very wise. They spent a lot of time thinking about the problems they were trying to solve and architecting the foundation of the XtremIO array, long before they started writing the code. They had an ambitious vision and made sure they executed wisely to realize it.
So what’s different about XtremIO’s vision? What makes the product unique in this increasingly crowded field? The answer lies in how XtremIO defined the problem they were solving. XtremIO didn’t set out to build a faster storage array using flash like so many others before them. Rather, XtremIO looked at the problems faced in a large-scale, modern virtualized data center and sought to alleviate them. Random I/O performance is certainly one of those problems. But so are scale, cost, environmental impact, improving the ability to handle dynamic VM cloning, and dealing with VMotion operations – all during high volume production hours. By looking at the problem holistically, XtremIO has innovated in areas passed over by others and delivered a superior architecture based on a grander vision. With XtremIO, performance is only the start.
Early XtremIO customers have seen amazing things happen in their data centers and said things like “Damn impressive machine I have to say”, “It blew our minds”, and “The XtremIO difference is staggering”. We’re excited to roll out XtremIO to the world and have complete confidence that architecture matters just as much to our customers when they make their purchasing decisions as it did to EMC when we made ours.
