XTremeIO An all-flash scale-out enterprise storage array that provides substantial improvements to I/O performance.

Purpose-built to leverage flash media, XtremIO delivers new levels of real-world performance, administrative ease, and advanced data services for applications. XtremIO has been available for a year and a half and has become EMC’s fastest selling product. The latest version (v4.0) extends and expands on its on-demand capabilities and consolidates workloads at “unprecedented levels of performance and availability.” The new 40TB X-Brick building blocks provide double the previous density and offer non-disruptive performance and capacity expansions.This new version also aids customers with in-memory copy services for their data centers, which streamline entire workflows, and automate from storage through the hypervisor and into the application.

These features continue driving the rapid adoption of XtremIO across mission-critical workloads and workflows such as software DevOps, real-time analytics, production and non-production database acceleration, SAP landscape consolidation, private/hybrid clouds, enterprise-wide VDI, messaging and collaboration and electronic medical records

→ XtremeIO is yet another Storage array but all FLASH (uses Multi level cell SSDs) and definitely IOPS to die

for. Take a look into the system specifications and the IOPS in particular in the EMC PDF below,

→ The modus-operandi is also similar to any FC/ iSCSi Storage array. Host configuration steps include Zoning, Mapping and Masking (terms may differ as per the storage type and vendor). Rear-view of the XtremeIO array (called as X-Brick || AFA – All Flash Array) is as below,

→ Zoning Considerations are also similar to any 2-storage controller array,

→ The X-Brick controllers run on XiOS which is the operating system of the array,

→ XtremeIO can be managed by GUI or Command Line. A CLI help is attached below,

Following screenshot(s) shows the XtremIO host configuration

→ We will assign XtremeIO Volume as ASM disk on ORACLE RAC Cluster running RHEL 6.5

1.) Select “Add” and then type a name and size (e.g. – Create a 1 TB volume)

2.) Select the Volume from Left panel and initiators (Host_HBA) from the right panel

3.) Click “Apply” and the Volume created of size 1 TB will be visible to the ASM folder (e.g. - 12C is the

ASM folder name in this case). As the following screenshot shows, highlighted “data5″ gives us details

about the volume in advance of performing tasks on the host. The properties tab shows us the NAA

Identifier.

4.) In order to discover the LUN on all the hosts/ nodes in the cluster we need to scan the hosts.

# multipath -F ;service multipathd restart ; rescan-scsi-bus.sh –r

5.) After verifying the volumes were visible under DM-MPIO the udev rules file needs to be updated on both

all the hosts/ nodes in the cluster followed by the udev update commands on all hosts/ nodes in the cluster

(RAC hosts)

6.) Finally we can see “/dev/asmdisk6″ on all RAC hosts

7.) Adding the XtremeIO disk to ASM DG called “DATA” using ASMCA (ASM Config Assistant)

NOTE : We can view the rebalancing on the Performance tab

Food for thought :

1.) XtremeIO Content Addressing : https://vimeo.com/104646620

2.) XtremeIO Sales Presentation : https://vimeo.com/104646785

3.) XtremeIO Architecture : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIIwbd5J7bE