EMC XtremIO Flash Storage (discontinued) vs. Huawei OceanStor

XtremIO would be useful for any production storage environment, or even any staging or development environment where performance mattered. It would not be ideal to use for backup storage.

We connect the Huawei OceanStor SAN device directly to the Huawei Fushion Servers, without using the SAN Switch, with 16 HBA cards in MESH topology. Each of the two controllers has four 16 HBA inputs under the name of SMART IO. In addition, there are two 8 GB extension ports. VMware virtual machines are running on hosts. Our ERP applications, critical DBs, and business applications are running in these. Again, we use another SAN under a different cluster in the disaster recovery section.

• The deduplication and compression is very good. This especially helps for VDI applications.
• It is easy to setup and map hosts to volumes.
• The new HTML5 console is much better than the older Java.

• The Huawei OceanStor Dorado All Flash NVMe storage array provides maximum performance.
• The OceanStor Dorado is ideally suited for use with databases, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Virtual Machines, and file server environments.
• The capital and maintenance costs were very competitive for a similar storage system at other storage vendors.

• Its expensive but worth it

• Support desk to be available.
• Implementation to new people is not that easy.
• Setting of the advance features on Huawei OceanStor may not be easy to all users.

This was one area of real disappointment. EMC support was very slow to schedule work like installations and upgrades. Break/fix support was fairly standard. After the Dell merger, things have started improving but there is a lot left to be desired here.

When purchasing support for your Huawei OceanStor system, there are two support options offered by Huawei (i.e. Hi-Care and Co-Care). Huawei Hi-Care service is when Huawei responds to your technical requests for remote troubleshooting and advance hardware replacement in the shortest possible time. Hi-Care provides onsite technical support to help you maintain a more efficient and stable network environment and improve network productivity. Whereas, Huawei Co-Care service is a collaborative solution delivered by Huawei certified partners. Depending on the capability of your Huawei support partners, I would recommend Hi-Care for mission-critical environments since this ensures Huawei takes responsibility for meeting the support SLAs. If you have very capable Huawei support partners, then Co-care could be a more cost-effective support option.

I/O delievered by XtremIO can't be compared with any other flash storage. Existing relationship with vendor and pressure to improve I/O bottleneck was the key objective

All Flash NVMe SSD technology is currently at the top of this business. Its disk structure is hundreds of times faster than traditional mechanical SAS systems, but also compared to today's SSD systems! It has a much more affordable price than the devices of the same class. In addition to these, we had a lot of hesitation when we decided to give up the competitor brand and buy a product that works reliably and smoothly, but we researched and learned very well. We made the right choice.

• Using XtremIO has made our VDI much more palatable for users.

• Searching of information is effective and faster.
• Different data type storage.
• Analytics provided are valuable.
• Reporting is easy.