Xiotech Corporation announced that Forbes Energy Services purchased an Emprise 5000 storage system to serve as the foundation of its storage infrastructure. The rapidly expanding oil and gas company recently went public and selected the Emprise system, powered by patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, as part of an organization-wide initiative to ensure all systems and processes are compliant with financial regulations.

Based in Alice, Texas, Forbes Energy Services is an oilfield services contractor that provides well servicing and fluid logistics products and services primarily to the Texas market. The company was established in 2003 and has grown to a $200 million company with more than 1500 employees.

Previously using a direct-attached storage system, Forbes Energy Services wanted to move to a solution that would provide it with a more centralized storage infrastructure. To make its decision, the company turned to its managed services partner, Resonant Technology Partners. After considering several options and working with Resonant, Forbes Energy Services determined the Emprise 5000 system, connected to multiple servers in a Fibre Channel network, would help it best manage and control its growing volumes of emails and electronic documents.

The system's industry-leading performance and five-year hardware warranty were key selling points. "I was very impressed by the industry-leading SPC price-performance numbers of the Emprise 5000 system, along with the five-year hardware warranty," said Pete Crisp, director of IT, Forbes Energy Services. "The fact that Xiotech is backing up the Emprise solution for five years gives me great confidence in the system's reliability, and the predicted total cost of ownership of the Emprise 5000 beat all other vendors considered. It was an easy decision after the initial evaluations."

Forbes Energy Services purchased the 4.8 terabyte Emprise system to manage its existing data and plans to implement it next month.

Emprise 5000 is a self-enclosed, virtual storage system that can be switch-attached or direct-attached to a server. Its patented ISE technology means customers never have to worry about drive failures, thanks in part to its self-healing capabilities — a commitment Xiotech backs with the five-year warranty. Its performance also is linearly scalable, so that two systems roughly double the performance of one.

The ISE technology overcomes issues of traditional data storage solutions by tightly integrating drive, enclosure and controller software and firmware and by distributing much of the processing and cache into the enclosure for a much more efficient storage system. This design also provides greatly improved and simplified scalability by pooling storage to create a singular storage element that is 20 to 40 times the capacity of a typical disk drive, with the internal processing power and cache it needs to handle all drive management functions.

After completing the Emprise system implementation, the company's next step will be to add a disaster recovery site. Forbes Energy Services currently plans to add a second Emprise system and implement replication capabilities between the two using Xiotech's Timescale CDP data protection system.

Resonant, a new Xiotech channel partner, played a critical role, and helped Forbes Energy Services understand how a new Emprise system would best solve its business needs today while making it easier to add storage capacity in the future.

Based in San Antonio, Texas, Resonant Technology Partners is a full-service IT solution provider for small and midsized companies in the greater South Texas area. Its clients represent a cross-section of all industries, and rely on Resonant for many different IT services, such as networking integration and business application development.

"We became a Xiotech channel partner after learning about the new Emprise storage systems," said Stephen Mark, chief executive officer, Resonant Technology Partners. "Xiotech developed truly compelling technology, and we are thrilled to bring this new technology to our customers. We look forward to a long-standing business partnership with the Xiotech team as we continue to deliver managed services and solutions to Forbes Energy Services and other new customers in the Texas area."

Xiotech recently announced a new three-tiered channel partner program to help it capitalize on new opportunities with the Emprise line quickly. The new partnership with Resonant and purchase of the Emprise system by Forbes Energy Services illustrate the program's initial success.