Whoa, bro – it's all go for cool crow X-IO's AFA show

X-IO's five-year warranty, maintenance-free sealed disk and disk+flash arrays have a new brother: the all-flash ISE. It’s sprinted right to the top of the SPC-1 price/performance benchmark charts.

The ISE 800 comes in a standard 3U X-IO enclosure and uses X-IO’s Gen 3 architecture, which first appeared in the ISE 780 in January. There are three models:

• 820 – to 6.4TB pre-RAID capacity (2.7TB RAID 10, 4.3TB RAID 5)
• 850 – to 25.6TB pre-RAID capacity (11.4TB RAID 10, 18.3TB RAID 5)
• 860 – to 51.2TB pre-RAID capacity (22.9TB RAID 10, 36.6TB RAID 5)

All provide a max of 400,000 IOPS, or 260,000 IOPS with what is called an OLTP workload. There is up to 5GB/sec of bandwidth available.

ISE 800

The operating system has support for VMware VASA, vSphere Web Client, vRealize Operations and OpenStack Cinder driver. It also features active-active synchronous mirroring, thin provisioning, quality of service and a ReST Web Services API.

X-IO specifically says that performance does not slow down as the array fills with data – 100 per cent performance at 100 per cent capacity is the claim – and nor will it slow down over the machine's five-year warranted lifetime.

Upgrades are non-disruptive and the components are redundant for reliability. Host connectivity is via 8 x 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel (SAN and DAS) with a 1GBitE management port.

Systems in 200,000–300,000 SPC-1 IOPS range

The 820 has been submitted for an SPC-1 benchmark^* – testing random storage array IO performance – and recorded 252,981.83 SPC-1 IOPS with a 2.06ms average response time and lowest-ever $/SPC-1 IOPS figure of $0.32^**, breaking the previous record of $0.40 recorded by an all-DRAM Kaminario K2 array. The previous all-flash array record was NetApp’s EF560 with $0.54/SPC-1 IOPS.

SPC-1 $/IOPS ranking

In pure SPC-1 IOPS terms, the ISE 800 is just faster than NetApp’s EF560 (245,011.76 IOPS) and a 6-node NetApp FAS6240 cluster (250,039.67 IOPS). HP’s StoreServe 7450 is faster still at 258,078.23 IOPS, but its $/IOPS figure is higher than X-IO’s, at $0.58.

In terms of bangs-per-SPC-1-buck, X-IO’s ISE 800 is the best box out there, although this calculation uses list pricing and your street price may vary. X-IO is aiming it at the OLTP market, and particularly Microsoft SQL use cases. Other use cases include business intelligence and trading desks. VDI must also be a possibility.

The all-flash array market now has another competitor, one with thousands of customers who could upgrade to the array at once, and one with SPC-1 benchmark creds and equivalent performance to HP’s 7450 and NetApp’s EF5660. X-IO’s channel should love it.

Our impression is that X-IO has let some fixed ideas concerning disks go and is now more open to developing technologies. We should expect more through its product development pipe soon.

List prices are $124,900 for the 820, $320,000 for the 850 and $575,000 for the 860. The ISE 800 is available from X-IO and its resellers now. Data sheet here. ®