VMworld 2016: Whats New With XtremIO?

Short answer? Momentum. EMC has the industry’s best AFA portfolio as I mentioned in my last post – from the unified mid-range (Unity), the most mature and widely deployed rich enterprise data services (VMAX), and the best “clean sheet” scale-out system (XtremIO). When it comes to HCI/SDS – we have all flash-ScaleIO and all-flash VSAN of course.

How do I feel about our position? Well…

…Even shorter answer – and let’s make this focused on the strongest next-gen, clean sheet design AFA, and make it XtremIO specific? You want it in the spirit of the recently completed Olympic Games?

Life has gotten VERY busy for me in my new role (I know, excuses, excuses).

As you might decode watching these videos – I recorded these several weeks ago, and took a calculated gamble using the Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps references… Would have been awkward if they didn’t win. Of course, they are champions – and it was a safe bet.

Likewise, XtremIO is a champion and a safe bet :-)

Reflecting on it a couple weeks later… if I was recording the video now, I would have drawn the analogy to Canada’s own Penny Oleksiak. She is an even BETTER analogy than Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps.

Penny Oleksiak

The picture above is Penny winning one of her 4 Olympic medals this year (gold in the 100m freestyle, silver in the 100m butterfly, and bronze in the 4x100m and 4x200m relays with her Canadian teammates).

The snapshot above is XtremIO winning in the market. Award winner. Revenue winner. Share winner. 65% of the Fortune 100, and climbing. We did $1B+ in 2015. Can you imagine where it is now, 9 months into 2016?

So why is Penny (your my hero Penny!) an even better analogy when it comes to XtremIO?

Like Penny, XtremIO is young. Penny is 16 (which is insane), and this was her first Olympics. XtremIO is only a few years old – acquired by EMC in 2012, and in development for about 6 years which makes it a teenager in “storage stack years”. Storage stacks take 5-6 years from inception to firm up, and they hit their full stride a few years after that.
Like Penny, XtremIO came out of nowhere. Penny started swimming competitively just 3 years ago (CRAZY). XtremIO went GA 3 years ago. 3 years ago, all the AFA startups where all the rage – with Violin, Pure and a few others the talk of the town. 3 short years later, the AFA market only has one of those startups in any position of some relevance (Pure), with most of the startups gone or nearly gone – time flies. In 3 short years, Penny became an Olympian and 4 medal winner. In 3 short years, XtremIO became the fastest growing product in EMC history, and far and away the AFA market leader by share and by revenue – and the gap is widening.
Like Penny, XtremIO has a long bright future ahead. In 4 years, Penny will be 20, and for swimmers, that age of 18-22 is really the peak. There’s lots of maturing, strengthening muscles, refining strokes and flip turns ahead. I can’t wait to see what’s in Penny’s future at the 2020 Toyko Olympics! Likewise, XtremIO has a bright, bright future – with maturing, strengthening muscles, refining strokes and turns.

I want to elaborate on that last bullet re “maturing”, “strengthening”, “refining”.

With XtremIO doing well – we’re seeing all sorts of crazy in the market. Because we didn’t announce a major update since EMC World (umm, that was only a couple months ago) and the pending Dell/EMC merger some (I would wager some of our competitors) are suggesting that XtremIO is going to be put out to pasture.

Umm, take the industry’s strongest AFA, our fastest growing product and put it out to pasture? NO. I think some competitor salespeople are getting a little delusional, and perhaps trying to get leverage from the Dell EMC merger.

That said, is XtremIO perfect? Goodness no!

Like Penny, XtremIO needs to mature. While both are already gold-medal winners – champions are always working to be better. We are spending a lot of time and effort to continue hardening the core XtremIO platform. XtremIO is doing very well statistically when it comes to availability relative to our storage stacks that have more run-time (and as you can see from the stats above – with 7000 X-bricks deployed, is at the scale where stats matter). However, we know we really need to double down on hardening the platform, improving updates, cluster expansions and other use cases. We’re now on release 4.0.5 – and the focus has been squarely on platform hardening. As customers press XtremIO into their most mission critical use cases, they want a rock, and we must always deliver.
Like Penny, XtremIO needs to strengthen muscles. In time, of course there will be a 5.x release. Of course there will be new X-brick hardware. Of course there will be denser media. Of course there will be larger clusters. And… of course we’re looking at ways to add more capacity when you don’t need the compute/memory of an X-Brick (aka adding the right amount of “Scale-Up” to the great Scale-Out architecture of XtremIO. Those are the “muscles” of the future.
Like Penny, XtremIO needs to keep refining strokes and flip-turns. Any elite swimmer knows you need to have talent and drive (great engineers, great support, great sales and marketing), a body for swimming (architecture matters and ultimately the core product needs to rock!) – but it’s the “little things” that separate the best from the rest.

Here, the “little things” are features like VMware and application (Microsoft ecosystem too) integration.

That’s what’s new NOW. Last week, we announced several big steps forward in refining our “strokes” and “flip-turns”. My friend and colleague Itzik Reich did a great series of posts here, here with demos, details and more – but I will hit the key news below. As has been our pattern with these sort of things in recent years – most of this bonus capability is available for free with the platform itself, as well as in some cases in incremental scale/functionality commercially.

New EMC XtremIO application integration and management features for virtual machines via SMI-S and VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) – simple workflow automation for provisioning and local and remote replication work – standalone or for use in conjunction with vRealize Automation.
Simplified storage management in virtual environments with XtremIO Management Server leveraging EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) and EMC AppSync. Together – these provide amazing vCenter integration, automation of best practices, and also VMware and application-integrated copy data management. With VSI at version 7.0 (and this single plugin supports all EMC products) – it’s hard to think of anyone who has been at it for this long, this consistently.
Expanded SMI-S support for Microsoft SCVMM and Azure Pack integration. While less interesting to a pure VMware shop (where VASA is the control-plane path), for customers using the Microsoft ecosystem, SMI-S support is important.

Native PowerShell 4.0 and 5.0 support. With Microsoft open-sourcing PowerShell (interesting – more here), I suspect this will only accelerate people using PowerShell for all sorts of automation. Like all our EMC open source projects, you can find it at EMC{code}!
Tech Preview (aka Beta) HTML5 web-based XtremIO GUI. People dig the simplicity of the XtremIO UI (dig the XMS itself less – aka the external physical or VM-based management appliance). We’re working to always improve – and in XMS 4.2, customers get a Tech Preview of the new HTML5 UI – something you can access from a mobile device.

To all XtremIO team, THANK YOU. To our customers, an even bigger THANK YOU. It’s never easy to bring new products to market, and as all veterans of the IT industry know, it’s even harder to maintain success, quality, innovation though the growth years.

And to all who will enjoy the awesome VMworld 2016 hands-on-labs, know that like the last four years, XtremIO is one of the ingredients that underpins the labs and makes them possible.

Like Penny Oleksiak – XtremIO is just getting started – I can’t wait to see what will happen in the coming years – for both :-)