EMC officially launches the fruits of the May 2012 XtremIO acquisition-- the XtremIO all-flash storage array, one the company claims "redefin[es] what's possible with all-flash array storage."
The XtremIO is based on modules EMC calls "X-Bricks." Available in 10TB capacities (20TB to follow in 2014), X-Bricks carry 256GB of RAM, and customers can cluster up to 4 together, with in-line deduplication allowing the configuration of around 250TB of effective capacity within a single cluster and performance reaching 1 million IOs per second.
Clusters scale from 2 to 8 controllers and up to 128 cores, allowing for the handling of OLTP databases, virtual servers and VDI workloads with active data services.
EMC touts four features setting the XtremIO array apart from the rest of the flash-based competition-- content-based data placement (keeps array balanced via in-line deduplication), dual-stage metadata engine (leverages the random access nature of flash), XtremIO Data Protection (a flash-specific algorithm guarding against SSD failure) and shared in-memory metadata (rapidly clones information within the array to accelerate common tasks).
It is integrated within the EMC ecosystem as well as VMware vSphere and VAAI storage APIs.
First revealed under the "Project X" handle back in March 2013, the XtremeIO array was actually already available to a number of select EMC customers from last April.
Go EMC Announces General Availability of XtremIO All-Flash Array
