SOLUTION OVERVIEW

ESSENTIALS Challenges

Databases demand consistent low latency and exceptional I/O performance to respond instantly to OLTP transactions and shrink Business Intelligence batch processing times. Hence, consolidating and virtualizing databases has been considered a risky initiative for any enterprise.

The Solution

VSPEX with XtremIO ensures predictable levels of performance for database environments demanding hundreds of thousands of IOPS and sub-millisecond latency.

Simple

Proven reference architectures, delivered by EMC partners simplify full-stack deployment and management.

Efficient

Flexible

Scalable Reference Architecturesthat provide flexibility with support for industry leading virtualization, server and networking technologies.

EMC VSPEX WITH XTREMIO FOR MICROSOFT SQL SERVER

Unleashing Agility and Performance for Microsoft SQL Server

THE CHALLENGE: PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY IN A DIGITAL WORLD Enterprises looking to compete within the new digital world need to overcome the limitations of traditional storage and handle the demands for greater I/O performance driven by new applications, virtualization, and the cloud. Explosive growth in web “consumerization” has created administration, audit, protection, and management challenges for many companies.

In today’s increasingly demanding business environments, enterprises are continually being driven to optimize processes and improve customer service. Consequently, there are increasing demands being placed on IT infrastructures to deliver higher performance – particularly around transactional workloads with high sensitivity to responsiveness. Enterprises using Microsoft SQL Server within a highly transactional environment must consider new approaches to meet increasing performance, capacity and scalability requirements at reasonable costs.

THE SOLUTION: VSPEX WITH XTREMIO FOR MICROSOFT SQL SERVER VSPEX with XtremIO for Microsoft SQL Server, provides a solution for the most demanding SQL Server online transaction processing (OLTP) environments where achieving and sustaining superior input/output operations per second (IOPS) with minimal latency are critical factors in helping you meet your Service Level Agreements.

The XtremIO storage array is an all-flash system that was designed from the ground up to deliver unmatched predictable and consistent performance with near zero latency. In OLTP TPC-E like testing, XtremIO produced over 200,000 IOPS while maintaining a latency under 1ms increasing SQL server 2012 and 2014 database workloads reaching more than 4,200 complex transactions per second (TPS).

XtremIO also solves the issues that result from having separate storage silos for production, dev/test, as well as reporting and analytics environments. With truly unique data copy management capabilities enabling these environments to all be combined onto a single array. Combining our in-line all the time data reduction capabilities with our space efficient copies, Customer no long have to endure the time to copy databases, nor the storage sprawl that results.

SIMPLE: EMC PROVEN, PARTNER DELIVERED Sized and tested by EMC, VSPEX with XtremIO for SQL Server ensures predictable levels of performance and scalability for high performance workloads, delivered as a reference architecture can focus on your business and not worry about your infrastructure. The VSPEX with XtremIO storage system is based on scale-out architecture that begins with a single building block, called an X-Brick. When additional performance and capacity are required, the system easily scales out by adding X-Bricks. Performance scales linearly, ensuring that each X-Brick increases performance while latency remains consistently low. This is accomplished through XtremIO’s powerful combination of 1) X-Brick building blocks to scale processing and I/O with capacity, 2) its RDMA infiniband fabric combined with in-memory global

metadata, and 3) its XIOS software with inherent software balance and data protection across the cluster.

XtremIO implements content-based Inline Data Reduction, which automatically deduplicates and compresses data as it enters the system. On XtremIO arrays, data reduction is always on and occurs in-line minimizing I/O activity ensuring only unique data is ever placed on flash. Testing shows that XtremIO storage requirements are 90 percent lower when compared to traditional storage consumption planning.

EFFICIENT: HIGH PERFORMANCE FOR DEMANDING WORKLOADS All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) are the preferred choice to accelerate high-performance OLTP and decision support/analytics applications on Microsoft SQL databases. But not all AFAs are equal. XtremIO’s unique clean-sheet scale-out architecture offers powerful inline and always-on data services with consistent performance. The architecture allows for the simplification and consolidation of production, real-time analytics, development and testing, and the broader database infrastructure.

Not all AFAs have snapshots. Where snapshots are available, they are not space-efficient, have huge performance and metadata overhead, and cannot scale. XtremIO’s full-performance snapshots are metadata and capacity space-efficient as well as inherently writeable.

And, XtremIO is the only all-flash array to fully integrate (block zeroing, XCOPY, ATS, unmap) with VMware’s VAAI vStorage APIs for Array Integration, allowing the system to provide array-based and data reduction enhanced host offloading of common VMware provisioning tasks.

With XtremIO’s array-based deduplication and enhanced copy services, entire high performance application development environments can be created instantaneously and with practically no additional capacity consumption.

FLEXIBLE: DELIVER DATA CENTER AGILITY XtremIO’s flash-specific data protection algorithms ensure the array is as resilient as it fast. Every cluster-scaling unit (called X-Bricks) has its data protected in an N+2 scheme that tolerates multiple simultaneous SSD failures. Optimal data encoding and decoding processes recover from failed SSDs rapidly with distributed rebuilds. Hot spares are not needed since XtremIO’s distributed rebuilding process utilizes free spares in the array. It’s data protection that is faster, safer, utilizes less capacity overhead, and yields the highest flash endurance.

XtremIO also eliminates the need for planned downtime by providing non-disruptive software and firmware upgrades to ensure 7X24 continuous operations. Furthermore, each X-Brick has hot pluggable components offering benefits requiring no planned downtime to swap out hardware, faster rebuilds, no hot spares, and the ability to leave failed SSDs in place until a convenient replacement time.

SUMMARY VSPEX with XtremIO reference architectures deliver complete virtualized solutions that are simple, efficient, and flexible. As with all VSPEX offerings, rigorous testing and validation eliminates the complexity of planning, sizing, and testing so that you can deploy a complete infrastructure. You can use this infrastructure for production and non-production workloads, and add capacity with linear and predictable expansion with a solution that offers high IOPS and low latency all the time, without compromise. And with VSPEX, support is simple. Just call EMC. A specialized VSPEX support team will handle all calls and stays on line until resolution. So you can rest assured knowing your entire VSPEX solution is fully supported by EMC.

EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc., in the United States and other jurisdictions. © Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 03/15 Solution Overview H14081

EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

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