XtremIO heading for the bin? Total BS, thunders CTO Itzik Reich

Storage industry jungle drums heard by El Reg suggest EMC is axing XtremIO product line development and putting it into maintenance mode due to scalability and data availability issues. EMC vehemently denies this, saying it's absolute FUD. Three independent sources say XtremIO is headed for a maintenance-only retirement home …

[Anonymous Coward]

wont anyone think of the puns?

i had so many hashtag puns ready to go if this had been true.

i hope all the relieved customers spare a thought for the broken-hearted satirists.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone Can Read the Tea Leaves

The article is right on the money. If you just put the pieces together....

VMAX AFA arrives out of the blue in Feb, 2016 with no advance briefing to field. Why no big prep for this ? Largest customers werent hearing it at executive briefings in Q4-2015?

Did VMAX AFA generate more sales than X-Bricks in its first full quarter (Q2) ?

Native X-Brick array based replication delayed over and over?

Largest SSD only available on VMAX and Unity?

X-Brick 8192 LUN limit means lots of snapshots for data corruption protection isnt an option.

Software releases for X-Brick slowed down to fix basic issues as a priority before adding features?

If VMAX has all the data services + compression, using largest SSD, 16GB FC ports, file and block support, and high density footprint, doesnt that address the Tier 1 SSD customer?

The Tier 2 SSD customer is handled by Unity at a lower price point, plus ability to support file as well as block.

After the music stops, does EMC need three SSD platforms ?

[Anonymous Coward]

DISCLAIMER: HPE Sales Rep

I've seen quite a few customers testing/evaluating XtremIO in the past but not a single customer of mine deployed it AFTER a PoC. Yes, I also have one customer (EMC Shop E2E) that runs it, but they forgot the PoC before (possibly because they got the X-Bricks for free after buying a set of VMAX3 Arrays).

So EMC throwing XtremIO to the bin really wouldn't surprise me after everything I hear from my customers that properly evaluated it. Given my experience and what I hear from colleagues and competitors (other than EMC :-)) I am truly surprised about the market figures EMC presents every single quarter. Would be curious to understand where all those Units go and how revenue is presented - maybe the numbers are freebies to EMC Shops presented at listprice :-).

Don't get me wrong - I am not trying to bash competition or praise my 3PAR AFA product with this post. It is simply an observation of myself - nothing more, nothing less. I see and compete against EMC, IBM FlashSystem, Pure and HDS. Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose; sometimes for technology, sometimes for price, sometimes for politics - that's life. But very rarely I even notice EMC XtremIO lately. It's not even that I compete against XtremIO much anymore - they simply don't even offer/position the product in most places. Everywhere I look they lead with VMAX3 Flash and/or Unity/VNX3.

This is a sales/market view any may be specific to my geo/area/territory. Possibly anyone having similar or completely diverse experience can post here and share their view.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think revenue can be exaggerated/flexible (but not fraudulent) when you have a lot to sell. An example:

As part of a large deal I put an fancy flash array on the floor. I get the customers buy in at an agreed price and then I discount my other kit heavily while making my flash array almost list price. My product gets sold and the revenue looks good, however revenue of traditional hardware declines.

Very simple way of inflating revenue of a product.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fairness it's hard for you to praise 3Par, the times have moved so quickly in the last 2 years it's been left behind.

Dedupe at 16k. Great for my 4k Citrix,,, not!

No compression. It coming we're told... another retro fit or controller forklift job?

Admins still need to config/select RAID policies/CFGs, Seriously!

With a modern AFA that's all done under the covers.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right

Not even EMC is pitching XtremIO anymore. The latest customer pitches I have attended with EMC leading the way have all been vBlock with Unity or vBlock with all-flash VMAX.

[Big_JM]

This is an interesting situation, isn't it? The Register hears EMC is killing off XtremIO, EMC denies it. So of course EMC is right, aren't they? Not so fast. Where there's smoke...

EMC will talk revenue BUT everyone knows EMC over comp'd their sales force to push XtremIO. So while they talk 'revenue' the industry counters with the fact that they hand no problem killing off VNX/VMAX revenue for XtremIO. They have no problem killing off VNX revenue in favor of Unity. There's no reason they wouldn't kill off XtremIO in favor of Unity & VMAX AF now.

Now consider this fact, outside of bug fixes there hasn't been a single major upgrade to XtremIO since the infamous data wipe to upgrade to get compression issue. That's going to be more than 3 years now. In addition to that, when VMAX AF was announced EMC told us XtremIO would be "rearchitected" to support 3D Nand drives. We're still waiting. No mention of it at EMC World. No mention of it anywhere else. Even here, in this article, they could have shown the Register a viable roadmap under NDA and made this rumor go away once and for all. They didn't.

Maybe they're not killing off XtremIO. Maybe there is an actual roadmap. Who knows? We know for sure there is definitely a problem here. No one goes a year without a major announcement. XtremIO has now gone almost 3 and in that time EMC has released two alternatives to XtremIO. There's no way around that.

[jbbbarr]

They are playing the HDN game

These competitors are just trying to catch up to Nutanix. All I see is a re-purposing of legacy infrastructure and calling it innovation. SDN=hardware agnostic, not the other way around :)

[Anonymous Coward]

#XtinctIO

I give you the hashtag #XtinctIO

Enjoy

[Anonymous Coward]

right path wrong product

based on what I am hearing VMAX is going to sunset sooner rather than later, but XtremeIO is the new flagship storage product.

That said they have some scale and stability issues which they need to fix ASAP and VN.errr. Unity running DS60 shelves (60x drives) loaded with low-performance 8TB SSD's will provide ~4.5M IOPS and 375TB of capability PER enclosure. hmmm put 4 of those enclosures on a high-performance Unity head, and you have 18M IOPS and 1.5PB(not including dedup) in ~30U

start putting these into VXrail, using VSAN and the power of hyper converged starts to look real

We are about to see some serious shake up in storage again. Faster, Denser, Cheaper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: right path wrong product

Disclaimer, a Netapp employee here,

I work in the financial sector and recently, the EMC goons have been trying to sell a customer of mine a VMAX AF, i was surprised that the account team didn't position XtremeIO..

anywyas, the customer wasn't stupid, he ran a POC with the VMAX, performance was A ok but immediately after he took a single snapshot, the array performance dropped significantly. now, that wasn't a surprising news to me since the VMAX snapshots were always garbage since the early days and that hasn't changed since the early days of the VMAX product hence my surprise about the positioning, later on, the account team said that if you need to run snapshots, the only viable product is XtremeIO, my customer told them to go away since he was stating that snapshots are a requirement and he felt as if EMC didn't play the "trusted advisor" role (trusted advisor, yea, right, it's all about the sales rep bonuses..)

anyway, since he also needed QoS which the XtremeIO doesn't support yet, he stayed with us, good for us! bad for EMC and their crappy products.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: right path wrong product

You're absolutely right. Not even EMC sales teams are positioning XtremIO anymore. It's all VCE Vblock with all-flash VMAX or Unity. They're also pushing VxRail real hard.

[Zerolab]

XtremEOL

[unredeemed]

While we're spewing rumors, I head Unity would be killed off in favor of Compellent.

They'll then make Compellent scaleout, borrowing from XtremIO.

While they're at it, bolt on Isilon on top of that, to replace that crap NAS Dell has now.

This will be the mid-range/high end. VNXe will be for all other workloads.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the voice of Chad Sakac

(In the voice of Chad Sakac in parody)

"Guys, guys, this is not a big deal. Products go through lifecycle changes all of the time and XtremIO is no different. When our great customers go through their next refresh cycle, we'll simply give them new gear for a small uplift and migration services and the only difference they'll see is face-melting performance which we won't independently verify. I will explain it all in my next 4,000 word blog post where I'll also cushion the disruption in my usual condescendingly folksy tone and mind-numbing details."

[Anonymous Coward]

Poison Kool Aid

Think of the market share they have gained and the people reading this article who thought they were doing the right thing buying AFA from EMC not knowing they would soon be dealing with D(H)ell instead of EMC. Then the moment they read this and realize the serious limitations of this product and the innocent mistake they made believing the hype but not really understanding the underlying architecture and the invisible handcuffs that have been slapped on them with regards to scale. If you are looking at AFA manufacturers you can't just compare it to spinning rust and think you are making a good decision. You have to look at the efficiency of the data placement and whether memory is able to splash onto flash or have that deer in the headlights look when you realize you've been sold something that won't scale the way other AFAs can scale both up and out. If you can't scale up and scale out... there is reasonable doubt!

[dpk]

Re: Poison Kool Aid

Spinning rust ? Must be a Pure employee...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Poison Kool Aid

Doubt it, Pure can't scale out.