Introduction

I’ve been doing some design work for a few customers and thought I’d put together a brief post on some considerations when deploying XtremIO. I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of the product, nor am I really interested in discussing better / worse alternatives. Let’s just assume you’ve made the decision to go down that track. So what do you need to know before it lobs up in your data centre? As always, I recommend checking EMC’s support site as they have some excellent site planning and installation documentation. There’s also a pretty good introductory whitepaper here.

Hardware Overview

X-Brick

The core hardware in the XtremIO solution is the X-Brick. I’ve included a glamour shot below from EMC’s website for reference. Each X-Brick is comprised of:

• One 2U DAE, containing 25 eMLC SSDs (400GB, 800GB or 1600GB SSD options);
• Two redundant power supply units (PSUs);
• Two redundant SAS interconnect modules;
• Two BBUs (per cluster); and
• Two 1RU Storage Controllers (redundant storage processors).

A one X-Brick configuration has the controllers directly connected via InfiniBand, whilst other configurations require 2 IB switches. X-Brick clusters can be deployed in combinations of 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8 X-Bricks.

Release 4.0

The latest release (4.0) has been generally available since 30 June 2015, and now supports:

• “Generation 3” hardware (the 40TB X-Bricks);
• Larger clusters (up to 8 20TB X-Bricks in a cluster); and
• Native RecoverPoint integration.

You can read Chad’s take on things here, as well as the XtremIO team’s announcement here.

Virtual XMS

You can optionally deploy the XMS (XtremIO Management Server) on a VM rather than physically. There are a few things you need to be mindful of if you go down this route.

The virtual XMS VM should have the following configuration:

• 8GB vRAM;
• 2 vCPUs; and
• 1 vNIC.

The virtual XMS VM should have a single 900GB disk (thin provisioned). Note that 200GB of disk capacity is pre-allocated following the cluster initialization. This should be provisioned on a RAID-protected storage. Note that shared storage used should not originate from an XtremIO cluster.

The virtual XMS should be located in the same LAN as the XtremIO cluster.

The deployed virtual XMS Shares memory resource allocation is set to High. As such, the virtual XMS is given high priority on memory allocation when required. If you’re using a non-standard shares memory allocation, this should be adjusted post-deployment.

In The Data Centre

Rack Requirements

The following table shows the required rack space depending on the number of X-Bricks in the cluster.

Power and Cabling

From a cabling perspective, your friendly EMC installation person will take care of that. There’s very good guidance on the EMC support site, depending on your access level. Keep in mind that you’ll want your PDUs in the rack to come via diverse circuits to ensure a level of resiliency.

In terms of power consumption, the table below provides guidance on maximum power usage depending on the number of X-Bricks you deploy.

Connectivity

From a connectivity perspective, you’ll need to account for both FC and IP resources. Each controller has two FC front-end ports and two iSCSI ports that you can present for block storage access. You’ll also need an IP address for each controller (so two per X-Brick), along with at least one for the XMS. For monitoring, the latest version of the platform supports EMC’s Secure Remote Services (ESRS), so you can incorporate it into your existing solution if required.

Conclusion

Should you decide to go down the XtremIO track, there a few things to look out for, primarily around planning your data centre space. It’s a nice change that you don’t have to get too bogged down in details about the actual configuration of the storage itself. But ensuring that you’ve planned for suitable space, power and management will make things even easier.