7 comments

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  marc farley

  9 months ago

  But not exactly very green.
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  thehotaisle

  9 months ago

  Hi Marc,
  
  Thanks for the comment but.... I thought that the point of the XIV was it used single 1TB SATA disks rather than the equivalent three 16,000 RPM energy sucking 300 GB monsters in a DMX, Tagma or DS8000? SATA drives use a hell of a lot less power.
  
  XIV gets it's performance from not having a single backplane, spreading data in 1MB chunks across lots of spindles and using smart caching software in a distributed cache rather than the normal enterprise controller shared cache.
  
  I am keen to see the Watts per GB stored and Watts per GB transferred figures to do a real comparison though. Steve Duplessie (Steve's IT Rants) picks up that an awful lot of XIV bashing that seems to be coming from EMC connected figures. Maybe EMC are worried, after all DMX 4 is the last of the range? Where do EMC go after this?
  
  Steve
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• 

  marc farley

  9 months ago

  Yes, 1 TB SATA drives help, but you have to start with a large number of them (180, I believe) and you have to use mirroring, and that's where my "anti-green" comment came from.
  
  Wide striping is good and I suspect XIV will have decent streaming performance, but their distributed cache connectivity is 10GB Ethernet (I believe, again) which has great bandwidth characteristics, but relatively weak latency characteristics, which will likely impact transaction processing capabilities.
  
  So, I'm from 3PAR and of course any product that a customer could purchase instead of ours is a concern to me. The reaction from EMC probably comes from a couple places: their competitive culture and wanting to stomp on the perception that the company is still running on Moshe's fumes. BTW, I like your question Steve. Hulk and Maui appear to be a large distributed file system type of product with content management built in.
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• 

  Richard

  9 months ago

  With a 'single point of failure' data modules (single controller with many disks) Rich certainly needs to demonstrate a failure of a single data module ... and a simultanious failure of the replacement module, during rebuild, at the same time. It would be interesting to know how long it takes to rebuild a fully loaded system in the above scenario and what the performance is while this is being done.
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• 

  Rich Kucharski

  9 months ago

  When you look at system performance and capacity, the XIV system is in a class by itself. Current generation platforms have a direct connection between performance and spindle speed which also impacts CapEx and Opex. With current generation storage arrays, the faster a drive is the smaller in size it is, ie 15k 146 gb. The XIV platform is not constrained by this limitation. As a result, we are able to leverage larger and "slower" drives to get similar type performance. This simple fact enables several things including, CONSISTENT performance, a more power efficient environment and the ability to eliminate storage tiers from the environment this enables customers to more easily manage their storage environment.
  
  The architecture employs a unique architecture that maximizes system performance through maximized spindle utilization and superior load distribution - the inherent technological limitations of SATA drives become less pronounced when factored into overall system performance and architecture. In various customer environments we prove that real-life applications exhibit better performance with XIV than DMX or other platforms, including OLTP applications and proprietary applications.
  
  This architecture also enables extremely fast data rebuilds, including drive failures or module failures. Since the architecture is based on data availability and data performance we can quickly and efficiently rebuild data when becomes suspect or there is a hardware failure, during this rebuild time system performance and availability is maintained. Our architecture is not a question or statement that "our drives are better than your drives", it is a statement of "Our platform provides better availability / performance than others." As mentioned above the system is based on a massively parallel architecture, this enables drive rebuilds to be measured on the order of minutes and entire module rebuilds are measured by an hour or two.
  
  We would invite you to take it for a POC an see for your self .
  reply
• 

  Alan Crean

  9 months ago

  $300m for XIV is credible as you really can see it as a radical innovation, its the $200m for Diligent that seems a high price to pay as there are a plethora of deduplication vendors out there now - I am sure it all has something to do with the fact that the same guy started and owened both companies
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• 

  thehotaisle

  9 months ago

  Alan,
  
  You may well be right, Moshe started the company with Doron Kempel in EMC's old Israeli R&D labs. Interestingly EMC got a 24% stake for a notional $5M investment and Moshe put in $10M of his own money.
  
  According to Andy Monshaw, Diligent apparently have the fastest de-duplication technology running at 5 times the speed of the nearest competition.
  
  A smart move if it can deliver de-duplication at wire speeds.
  
  Steve
  reply