EMC Corporation today announced the release of new application integration and management features in the EMC XtremIO all-flash storage platform for VMware and Microsoft virtualized environments. The new XtremIO features offer a rich set of workflow automation integrations that enable application and infrastructure teams to take full advantage of simplified resource provisioning and management workflows, automation and orchestration in virtualized environments. Integrated Copy Data Management (iCDM) functionality also helps reduce the need to purchase separate dedicated hardware and software to manage copy data sprawl.

Among more than a dozen updates to the XtremIO XIOS operating system, highlighted new features include:

• EMC and VMware product integrations between XtremIO, EMC AppSync, EMC VSI and VMware vCenter Web UI. This new integration enables the vCenter administrator to locally recover and restore virtual machines and datastores, and perform file-level restores from within the virtual machine. This also enables new iCDM workflows from the vCenter native user interface, allowing users to create and repurpose functional copies using XtremIO's virtual copy technology.
  New XtremIO vRealize Orchestrator Plug-in, which acts on its own or as a part of the VMware vRealize Automation workflow. The new vRealize Orchestrator plug-in allows infrastructure teams to build a self-service catalog of automated, end-to-end, infrastructure workflows for virtualization administrators, DBAs, and application owners. EMC will enable VMware users to fully leverage XtremIO with VMware vRealize Automation to automate and orchestrate storage management and provisioning tasks, such as compute and storage provisioning and iCDM capabilities natively within the VMware interface.
• Native support for Microsoft PowerShell version 4.0 and 5.0 via the XtremIO Management Server. As a result, administrators can now benefit from a fully supported scripting environment, using PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI from XtremIO to automate and orchestrate any operation in a virtualized environment.
• New XtremIO support for the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), allowing users to manage and provision XtremIO storage natively in their SMI-S user-interface of choice. SMI-S enables broad interoperable management and provisioning of heterogeneous multi-vendor storage systems from a variety of SMI-S enabled applications. For example, XtremIO includes new support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtualized environments via the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) SMI-S profile. Going forward, EMC will continue adding support for other SMI-S client profiles in XtremIO.

EMC also released a beta version of XtremIO's new web-based HTML5 graphical user interface. This web-based user interface is designed to help provide XMS users with a simple, lightweight option for XtremIO reporting, monitoring and management - and supports access via mobile devices.

The rich set of application integration and storage workflow automation features built into XtremIO are designed to help simplify storage management and provisioning processes within major applications that are critical to both IT and business users. EMC will continue developing XtremIO to support integration and workflow automation capabilities for additional applications to help reduce the complexity of managing and provisioning storage and application copies.

See XtremIO at VMworld 2016 
For the third consecutive year, XtremIO all-flash storage arrays have been chosen to power the VMworld 2016 Hands-on Labs, an extremely demanding, IO-intensive instructional environment built for testing and demonstration of a variety of virtual and cloud-based workloads with hundreds of users in more than 100 sessions over four days. XtremIO all-flash storage is part of the foundational infrastructure of the VMworld Hands-on Labs that powers the hybrid cloud, end-user computing and software-defined data center environments that are built on top of the VMware software stack. XtremIO delivers high IOPS and predictable sub-millisecond latencies while providing 100% storage uptime and maximum storage capacity efficiency (upwards of 12:1), to ensure a world-class user experience against the high performance and reliability demands of the Hands-on Labs environment.

Availability 
New features within the latest release of the XtremIO operating system are available immediately as a free software update for customers with current support agreements. The XtremIO vRealize Orchestrator plugin will be available later this year.

"The XtremIO integrations with VMware vRealize Orchestrator empowers customers to perform critical tasks such as backup, replication and file-level restores for virtual machines natively in the VMware vCenter or the vRealize Orchestrator user interface. These integrations offer customers new features to help accelerate productivity, while protecting business-critical applications and data in a simple and efficient manner." -- Raghu Raghuram, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware