>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas,
it's the CUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018.
Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners.
>> And welcome back to The Sands everyone.
John Walls here along with Keith Townsend,
and we are at Dell Technologies World,
day one of three days of coverage here on theCUBE.
Keith, good to see you sir, it's been a while.
>> It has been about six months.
>> Where have we been, and you've got that going on.
You look so distinguished and professorial.
>> You know what, I'm trying to make up for the lack of hair.
(laughing)
I appreciate that you noticed.
>> Well it looks good, it looks good.
Two guests with us, talking today about Extreme IO.
We have Chhandomay Mandal, who is a Vice President of,
or rather Director of Marketing,
I gave you a promotion.
>> Yeah, actually I like that. >> Can I get one, too?
>> Director to VP, just like that, at Dell,
and Kandy O'Mara who's a solutions architect at VMware,
I'm sorry no promotion, Kandy, that's the way it goes.
So Chhandomay, if you would, before we get started,
let's talk about Extreme IO a little bit,
and tell the viewers at home a little bit about the product
and then we'll get into VMware's use of it
and how that's taking shape.
>> Yeah, so Extreme IO is the purpose build
market leading all flash add-in.
It's built on unique content, however meta data centric,
party controller architecture
coupled with intelligent software
that helps us deliver very high performance,
ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of
IOPs with consistently low sub millisecond latency,
irrespective of what the system load is,
how much data has written through the alley,
or whatever the workload characteristics are.
Now, this metadata centric architecture lends itself
to a lot of other benefits, for example,
we do in-line all the time data reduction
on the data path, and that leads to
not only very high storage efficiencies,
but also, since we do not write anything that's not unique,
down to the SSDs, it gives much more longevity
to the SSDs themselves, driving down costs.
Our thing is it's pretty simple to use.
>> And probably from a customer perspective, right,
that's the huge value.
>> Yes, it's pretty simple to deploy.
We have an intelligent HTML 5 best EY, that's consumer grade
easy to use at the same time,
providing all the enterprise functionalities
that you'll expect.
The fourth thing I'll mention
is integrated copy data management,
so because this is a extremely high performance
all flash alley, it is expected to do great in
well TP environments, marginalizer environments,
but on top of it, the way it is architected,
because of this always in memory metadata architecture,
the copies are literally as good as production volumes,
so it's not just for production,
you can actually use the copies to run workloads on them,
and you get the same performance, same in-line
all the time data surfaces on the production, on the copies,
and you can not really figure out any difference
between production volume and a copy volume,
so that lives in to a lot of business benefits
in terms of consolidating various copies
and changing the application workflows.
>> So Chhandomay, we'll dig into that in a second,
with the inline dedupe,
inline dedupe with copy data management,
but first let's bring it up higher in the stack.
Kandy, amazing performance numbers out of Extreme IO,
but the all flash market is an extremely crowded market.
For the average use end-user, as you engage customers,
and you come to them, you know VMware runs VMware
or Dell Technologies runs best on Dell Technologies,
how do you help customers, even when you look at the
Dell Technologies portfolio, when you have all flash V sand,
you have Isolon, you have Isolon with flash,
you have all these solutions,
how do you help them navigate the broad portfolio
and them come to the, give us some typical use cases
for an Extreme IO.
>> Right.
For our instance, the first implementation of Extreme IO
we have done was with SAP Hanna.
Now that's an in-flash memory database, so,
everything's in flash, you need a really fast
backend storage array.
So extreme IO, all flash with sub millisecond latency
is a perfect fit.
If your database is all-in memory,
you can't have a slow storage behind it.
You'll lose the performance, right,
your database will become degraded.
So that was our reason for going that direction,
was because of the all flash memory of SAP Hanna.
Now, the rest of those infrastructures
actually have good use cases for other things,
but in this case, for us, it was extreme IO.
>> So let's focus in on that SAP Hanna usage.
So SAP, in memory database, a lot of SI's will tell you
you know what, the storage layer just needs to be fast,
it doesn't have to be extreme IO fast,
what do you guys find,
what was the specific advantages in the SAP Hanna
that brought you down to extreme IO.
I mean the rights are done in memory, so.
>> Well, actually the rights actually go to the disc.
It is in memory, but it still has to write to disc
and get the response back, especially the rights, right?
>> Especially on SAP Hanna,
it has very specific requirements in terms of
when you're loading up the database,
it needs to load up in a very specific.
>> Kandy: It's like a tenth of a second, they use.
>> For SAP Hanna, even though it is a new memory database.
>> Right, that's where the misconception is,
people think oh we put out slower storage,
no you actually need the storage to be able to respond
back to the database as quick as it does.
The minimum requirement, I mean the maximum latency
is like a tenth of a second, I mean it's really low.
But it's sub millisecond, so we have no latency,
we are actually getting a through-put in the performance.
And there's other benefits with it as well,
always on the reduction, that's huge,
that's a big factor.
When you don't have to have multiple copies
sitting on your array, that saves you a lot of capacity.
>> So people are saying, crowded market,
lot of options, lot of choices,
what was it for you that specifically said, okay,
this is our product, this is what we want to dance with,
so to speak, because you've got a lot of options.
>> It was basically, it was the response
that was needed for performance,
and it was all flash, we were making a decision
on where we wanted to run SAP Hanna,
we did not have it implemented anywhere else,
and we were like, we have existing infrastructure,
and we were moving to a new data center,
and we had to make a decision where we wanted to go,
and extreme IO fit the bill,
it met many of our different requirements.
One of them was performance,
the second one was the total lower cost of ownership,
and then the snap technology, that was huge.
>> So, let's talk a little bit more
about that snap technology.
I've spent a lot of time as an SAP infrastructure architect,
and one of the most painful parts of SAP operations
is being able to refresh DEV, QA, M plus One,
the lower environments from production.
What advantages have your, have you and your customers seen
using snap management with extreme IO?
>> So, let me kind of give you the broader view,
and then you can talk about the very specific instances
that you have seen.
Extreme IO's snapshot technology,
we call it Extreme IO actual copies,
they are best in, best on the in-memory metadata.
And extreme IO doesn't write anything on the SSDs
unless it's unique across the entire cluster.
Snapshots, by definition, is a copy.
Like you mount it and make it writeable,
so, for us, when you take a snapshot,
it's an extremely fast operation,
because all that we are doing is updating
the metadata in memory, and then,
if you are keeping it as a prediction copy,
say for example, like as a read-only,
just to recover from a disaster,
then that's one purpose, but then the other purpose is
use them as writeable snapshot, where,
you can run your DES DEV, copy for backup,
all of those things.
Now, why can it do these things?
The reason is, all these copies,
they are not consuming any extra space.
Until you are writing something unique to it
as a DES DEV copy, right?
So now, you have that capability of consolidating
lots of copies, in our tradition,
I mean, our customers base, for every database,
there is literally like five to eight copies,
60% of the storage that gets consumed is essentially copies
now if you consolidated all those copies
into the single alley without consuming any extra capacity
at the same time delivering that very high performance,
not only for your production environment,
but also for your DES DEVs, Qas, sandboxing,
that gives the customer a lot of values,
not only in terms of infrastructure dollars,
but also transforming the application workflows,
improving the productivity of the developers,
and the storage admin, VM admin in general.
So that's where we kind of see across the board
from our VS customers.
Now, alright, what's your experience?
>> I'm like, "wow."
No, actually what we do is, we're a little different.
We actually use the writeable performance snapshots,
we use them at our DR site, and what we'll do there
is we'll mount those into a test bubble,
and it is having our production environment,
instead of needing a separate DEV environment,
we can mount basically, in a little isolated bubble,
those writeable snapshots, or copies,
and test anything we want
in our true little production environment.
And then toss it away when we're done.
So we can test out a new release,
or we can do something different with the database
or an application, and then when we're done, toss it away,
that way we don't need so many different environments
built out so it's a savings there.
We don't make the local copies,
what you guys were talking about for staging DEV,
those are already built out,
but we do put those on the same array now.
Used to be, you'd have production on one array
and stage on a different, right?
But now, because they're similar, and you want the dedupe
and the compression benefits,
you want them on the same array,
because that's where you gain that.
The snapshots we do at the target, we play with those,
the writeable, it's performance ready.
It's the same performance as if you were on the source,
which is a big game changer there for us.
>> And I think it's really, from a technical perspective,
really important to know why extreme IO
is so much better at snapshot management.
One of the things that Sanders will warn us,
is that snapshots degrade performance over a period of time,
so therefore the fact that you guys have a dedicated
metadata subsystem helps improve overall performance.
But I'd like to talk about your use case
for extending to your DR side.
So, from DR DI, what do you guys use to replicate data
from one extreme IO to your DR?
>> Right now, we, for us right now with SAP Hanna,
we're using recover point with extreme io snapshots,
which is fabulous because once the two sync up,
the first initial sync, at that point,
recover point literally just goes out and gets a snap diff
and that's all the data is transferring over,
so it lowers the requirements of your LAN,
you know the bandwidth requirements are lower,
so that's what we're using today.
It's a great tool for us.
And that way, we can mount it at the target site.
>> And then just briefly, we're about out of time.
Chhandomay, if you would, going forward,
let's talk about where you are in terms of development,
what you see as being maybe the next critical phase
for extreme IO.
>> So, in fact, here in Dell Technologies world,
we are announcing the ability of our
native repetition technology.
Kandy mentioned she is using extreme IO with Recover Point
that's a great solution.
Now, we are going to have the native repetition technology
and what's different from other solutions that are out there
is this replication is also metadata aware,
and as a result, it's not only sending
only the unique data over the web,
but also it's globally deduped and complex.
And, suppose on your target site,
you already have a data block.
That might be unique for your primary site,
and hence the primary says hey I need to send over this data
and our protocol is going to say,
yep, I have this metadata, I already have it,
so send me the metadata pointer to it,
and we are all done, we don't even need to send
that unique block that was in the primary site,
if it happens to stay, or it happens to exist,
on the secondary site.
As a result, we see great reduction in the wan bandwidth
that's going to be used, and the total capacity
that you will need between primary and secondary.
So that will also be reduced.
In fact, our numbers that we are going to say,
you can get 38% less storage capacity wise,
and wan bandwidth could be reduced as high as 75 to 80%
based on the traditional mechanisms.
>> So we actually did a test on this
to see the performance between replicating a database
using Recover Point on extreme IO with snapshots,
and then we also did it with extreme IO data replication,
and it was eight times faster.
It was eight times faster replicating
the same amount of data.
>> So less data loss in case of emergency,
just a higher level of service to the business.
>> Nothing like a happy customer, right?
>> Yeah.
>> I actually love this product,
I would not be talking about it, I really like extreme IO
and I've been doing this for a while.
>> Well, Kandy and Chhandomay, thanks for being with us,
we appreciate the time, sorry about the promotion.
(laughing)
I think you've earned it though.
Thanks for joining us, we appreciate it.
>> Together: Thank you.
>> Back with more from Dell Technologies World
here in Las Vegas, you're watching theCUBE,
back in just a bit.