Dell XtremIO Reviews

We primarily use the solution for custom development and customer case studies.

The solution's most valuable feature is its high performance.

The deployment of the solution could be simplified.

The solution should be integrated into the system by default and not separately.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable for SMBs.

Technical support is okay.

The implementation isn't exactly complex, but the solution should have some enhancements in it to make the process more centralized.

The pricing is okay. It tends to offer some of the best pricing, but I still think it could be better.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

My advice to those who plan on implementing the solution is to make sure you are doing accurate sizing. Don't just size for your current use only.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'm able to deploy a scalable amount of virtual machines from images of hundreds of gigabytes per second.

The solution's most valuable features are the inline data reduction and deduplication.

It's not an improvement so much as a query. What I'm curious about is whether or not the feature has the ability to do inline data reduction between two physical storage solutions. If we have one storage solution in the UK and the other in Australia, will the system be able to tell us what we have already, so we aren't sending 95% of our data across the world unnecessarily? I know that the feature works locally on the source solution. What I'm curious about is, would that data reduction feature work between two instances of XtremIO in two different places.

It was the company's choice to switch to this solution. I don't remember what we had beforehand. I think that they made the switch because we knew we were going to have a large amount of data. The data reduction deduplication that this solution offered was very valuable. We knew that if we were going to be doing an extremely high amount of the right operation, the inline data reduction would be valuable as well. 

The performance of some of the features of the solution is very powerful. XtremIO was powerful enough to allow us to disable features of other items.

If I didn't have to think about the cost, I would rate the solution ten out of ten. This solution is geared toward enterprise-level companies. Small and medium-sized businesses would find it extremely expensive.

What I like about this solution, is that it is really fast and it's really good in compression. So you can put a lot of data in line on it. I've used it for cases like VDI in a healthcare environment because we use multiple copies of it. It is very good and has very good performance. It can handle big workloads. 

What needs to improve is that the end compression uses a lot of CPU, which makes it difficult or impossible to upgrade. I believe that it has improved in the upgraded versions, which we don't have yet. Also, the price and interface should be simplified too. 

The program is very stable.

We had some difficulty when we tried to expand our XtremIO because it had to be done in a certain way and only EMC personnel were allowed to do it. That wasn't very flexible. But it seems to be better in the new version. Scalability is always a problem. 

The technical team is good.

We previously used another EMC program, but it was not flash only, so that's why we switched to this solution. It possible to buy an all-flash system and, based on the compression features, we changed to this unit. 

We were not allowed to do the initial setup ourselves. So it was done by EMC personnel and maybe that could be improved so that our partner, our supplier, could do it themselves so that you don't need an EMC rep to perform the installation.

My advice to others would be to test it first to see the expected ratios. Do a check to see if they deliver what they promise. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, I would like to see better scalability. 

The performance very good, and the use case is actually we decided to have all flash a couple years ago and Xtreme IO was one of the vendors that your EMC partner reccomended so there was no discussion of what kind of storage we would buy.

The most valuable features are:

• Complete performance
• Ease of use

The stability of the product needs improvement.

I am not too impressed with XtremeIO because we had a major failure.

It is very expensive to scale. You have to buy an additional system to extend from one disc, for instance. It is scalable, but extremely expensive to do so.

The technical support was very good, but since the merger with Dell, it is very bad. It went from very good to very bad.

It was very easy and straightforward to setup. We plugged it in, connected, and then started. Simple. Our technical team had no problem with it.

When choosing a vendor, we we value known companies, as a solution. In addition, we value Blue technology.

It is expensive if you need to increase scalability.

We used the product for our internal customers (Banking). The performance really improved for the end users with reduced costs.

It has very good performance for an application which needs lower latency and a better response, for example, in microseconds. It's very easy to use in terms of administrative tasks on the GUI.

At times, it's difficult to track down allocated resources as compared to other solutions, like VMAX and VNX, because it's completely software-based.

The GUI could be modified more in terms of how the different components are linked to each other.

Yes, we had issues with data corruption on one of the X-Bricks. The issue propagated to other X-Bricks as well.

No, in terms of scalability, we didn't encounter issues. It was very easy to add X-Bricks to the system.

Technical support was great in terms of first response and further troubleshooting assistance.

Yes, we were using a VMAX solution before. This product was incorporated in order to get better performance at a reduced cost for our internal customers.

I was not involved with the initial setup phase. My role was more focused towards administrative and implementation tasks after the product was installed.

Again, both the pricing and licensing were handled by another group. So, I can't comment on it.

Yes, there were multiple options evaluated and also incorporated for some percentage of the workload, like NetApp C-mode array. Specifically, XtremIO was considered for Xtreme Performance as advertised by vendors at a lower cost as compared to existing storage arrays, like VMAX and VNX.

It's very good in terms of performance and the ease of use of its GUI. However, we had issues at the data corruption level, which resulted in multiple X-Brick failures. It's a big question for the stability and availability when we have enterprise level customers on such an Xtreme Performance array.

Newer version V6 (XtremIO Data Protection XDP) increases performance with built-in data protection.

Improved density with ability to scale out to eight X-Bricks if necessary / more density on capacity.

In memory Space / Efficient Copies.

Moved and zoned our Prod Client facing Applications. Quicker response to the business and more efficiency.

Also assisted with large datasets, thus dramatically reducing our batch runs.

Newer HTML 5, no more JAVA required.

Three years.

In the very beginning, with the old version 4, we had issues around Snap and clones.

Yes , I do recall we had an issue with a version of code on XtremeIO before we could Scale.

Seven out of 10.

We are using HDS and EMC.

I was not involved with setup.

I was not involved.

HDS, IBM and Pure storage.

A proof of concept will provide the best results for determining what solution you should go for.

None of the features are valuable for us. The product is poorly designed and not reliable. It performed well when it did work.

We have had no benefits from this product. It produced an outage and didn't deliver on promises made by the sales and engineering teams.

It needs a lot of improvement to be more like Pure Storage or Nimble AFAs.

We have been using this product for a year.

We had stability issues. We ran out of space pretty quickly and the cost to scale did not match our needs.

We had scalability issues. It does not scale in a granular manner.

The technical support is horrible. It took a week for them to get back to us on what caused the outage. Also, there are too many different teams that support the product internally.

We used EMC VMAX. We switched because EMC made it too costly to stay on VMAX and gave us discounts on XtremIO.

The initial setup was complex. We hired someone to do it. It took them two days. Our new array was done by my team in less than two hours.

EMC has not delivered on promises with their array. We have been with them for seven years and had five different arrays. Same story every time. Worst support in the industry.

We evaluated Pure Storage, Nimble, and SolidFire.

Don't do it.

It provides reliable and predictable performance with very little administration required beyond the initial setup.

• Speed – All Flash makes this array very extremely responsive to virtually all workloads, besting all of our spindle-based arrays by a large margin
• Linear performance – The XtremIO wasn’t the fastest in all tests against other all flash arrays, but even with a massive workload, the response time and user experience were absolutely predictable with no sharp drop-offs.
• Administration simplicity – The GUI is very intuitive and simple to use. Other vendors should take note.
• Excellent deduplication – An excellent feature and strength of the product. Inline dedupe gives you about as real-time on dedupe stats as you can get.

Native data replication: To replicate data between XtremIO devices, you need to use EMC’s RecoverPoint appliances to move the data. More and more arrays are providing the ability to replicate the data natively without the need for a secondary device to do it for them.

The EMC VNX platform is the same way. It only requires native replication via RecoverPoint. EMC’s flagship VMAX and their new Unity platform replicate natively. Even EMC's Isilon does data replication natively.

XtremeIO needs to catch up. That’s about the only Achilles heel of the product.

We have not had any issues with stability.

We have not had any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward. Follow the installation guide and it’s a slam dunk.

We evaluated HPE 3PAR, Pure Storage, and EMC VNX all-flash arrays.

We had an established EMC footprint in our data center and a good relationship. Exploring their AFA made sense. To keep things honest, we evaluated other products and conducted a PoC with other vendors.

The XtremeIO product wasn’t always the fastest, but it was absolutely linear in performance and we encountered no issues. The PoC kept pricing honest as well.

Several processes that used to take several hours to complete are now taking minutes to complete.

There are advanced features we currently are not utilizing (AppSync, Snaps of Prod, etc.) but they are features we plan to deploy that would bring additional efficiencies.

Speed and reliability: This system hosts several mission-critical, latency-sensitive workloads and XtremIO has delivered on those promises.

I would like hardware capacity additions to be a little more flexible. The upgrade path for the existing XTremIO units requires you to purchase 2 XBricks at a time and they need to be the same capacity as the existing XBricks.

-You could not mix drive sizes
-You could not add just a single XBrick
-You had to fully populate both XBrick’s
All of this equals a very expensive\large upgrade path
However; after saying all of this, EMC announced a new generation of XTremIO (X2) which allows more granular growth, mixed drive size, etc…
(You need to purchase new hardware – I don’t believe they are adding these features to existing XTremIO Clusters.)

Knock on wood, we have not had any stability issues.

We have not specifically had scalability problems. Upgrade paths are fixed.

Paths, capacity, and performance scale as X-Bricks are added.

Technical support is excellent. This product line receives high-level support.

The only negative was enough field support during early deployments (longer lead times than average). That has since been resolved with additional training and staffing levels.

We were using several other technologies prior to introducing XtremIO.

We switched because PoC testing proved the all-flash option to offer superior performance as compared to existing in-house technologies.

The install and setup was very easy and straightforward. With the proper pre-planning and facility work (power, cooling, network & FC connections), we were up and operational within a few hours:

1. Installed a virtual appliance to manage the clusters.
2. Assigned IPs to network ports for management.
3. Connected FC ports to existing SAN fabric.
4. Zoned hosts to ports.
5. Carved out LUNs and assigned to zoned hosts.

At first glance, this solution is pretty expensive. However, when you factor in inline deduplication, inline compression, zero-overhead snaps, thin, etc., you find the overall cost to be inline\better than with traditional tier 1 storage subsystems.

With some workloads that benefit from compression and deduplication, costs are actually better than some tier 2 subsystems (while latency remains <1ms).

This makes some happy dev testers!

We did research several other vendors (Pure Storage, Hitachi, IBM, etc.), but we only conducted a PoC on EMC’s XtremIO.

Download and utilize a free deduplication\compression tool to identify effective rates to determine effective capacity cost.

VDI is one of the top mission-critical things we offer our users. This storage runs our whole VDI environment and barely shows a blip on I/O. Previously, we had ran the VDI on non-flash storage and when Windows updates came out, we had to install them in schedule segments so as not to overload the storage. With this storage, we do them all at the same time and there is no impact to performance if 1 or 100 VMs reboot at the same time.

Dedupe, compression and high I/O are the most valuable features. It is great for applications like Microsoft Exchange, ERP, SQL and VDI; basically saved the VDI buy-in from users, as now performance was seamless in comparison to a physical PC.

Get rid of the Java aspect of the GUI console. Basically, the GUI to administrator the array uses Java as its base to run on. Java at best is buggy and prone to loading issues, so moving away from this platform would be nice.

We had no issues with stability.

We had no issues with scalability.

I would give technical support 9 out of 10. Nothing is perfect but they sure are close to it.

We previously used deployed EMC VNX storage (and still use it for our lower performance applications) and before that, we had Dell EqualLogic. We switched to an all-flash array as we wanted high performance storage for our three most critical applications (Exchange, ERP and VDI). We wanted to do a full VDI platform for all our users and locations. We wanted the best experience for them, as any hiccup would mean a lower buy-in rate from them. This storage made that task much easier.

We bought it through VCE, so they included setup with it. Things went smoothly. When we did receive the storage, within a day or two, we had a controller failure but since it had two controllers, there was no impact to users. Support was fantastic and got it replaced over the weekend, and we didn’t even have to do anything other than authorize them into our data center to replace the failed part.

It is costly but worth it. If the network or infrastructure you have is always a sticking point to users or management, spending the bucks on an all-flash array can help win them over.

We looked at more EMC VNX storage but at that time, we were not aware of this offering. When we started doing the talks with EMC, our rep pointed at this product line and once we saw a demo, we were sold. After more research, it didn’t take us long to get the paperwork in place. We also didn’t look at other vendors, as we utilize VCE as our main infrastructure at our data center so regardless of what model or product line of EMC we bought, VCE would handle the support. This was one of the main reasons of going with VCE, so we wanted to carry it on with the new storage.

I wish we bought double the capacity but we only had so much to spend, as I would put every application/server on this array.