Long-Awaited Disruptive Storage Technology Acquired From Seagate and Finally Revealed by Xiotech

Xiotech Corporation today announced a new line of storage systems
featuring the company’s patented Intelligent Storage Element technology acquired from Seagate Technology last November.

By using
ISEs as the fundamental element of storage instead of disk drives, the
Emprise storage systems are able to virtually eliminate the
need for service, scale from one terabyte to one petabyte and
dramatically boost performance, validated by SPC tests. The systems
include a five year hardware warranty and there is no price premium for
the new technology.

"It’s time for a new foundation for storage," said Xiotech Chief
Technology Officer Steve Sicola, who led a million-man-hour effort to
bring the ISE technology to market. "Exponential growth in data storage
capacity continues, but reliability, performance and manageability
haven’t kept pace. We have fundamentally rethought storage from the
ground up, and with the ISE have developed break-through technology,
which is tested, proven and ready to go."

Xiotech’s new storage systems include two models: the Emprise 7000 storage area network (SAN) system and the Emprise 5000
direct- and switch-attached storage system. The Emprise 7000 system
supports up to 64 ISEs and is managed by dual controllers. It includes
all of the storage capabilities that are currently available on
Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 line, including the Web
Services-based ICON Manager interface, optimal storage virtualization,
distributed cluster architecture, intelligent provisioning and a suite
of data replication solutions.

Emprise 5000, based on a single ISE, is a complete, self-enclosed
virtualized storage solution, which can be configured for high capacity
or high performance. Performance has been validated as industry leading
by the Storage Performance Council (SPC), a vendor-neutral standards
body focused on the storage industry. Emprise 5000 was No. 1 in lowest
cost per SPC-1 I/Os per second (IOPS) for disk arrays and per SPC-2
megabytes per second (MBps)1.

Prominent Early Adopters On Board
Newsweek Chief Technology Officer Len Carella, an early adopter of the
Emprise 7000 system, said his organization is moving its headquarters
and connecting all of its servers to a new SAN. "With more than 23
million readers, our success depends on producing a weekly news
magazine. While we currently replicate data to a recovery site, we
wanted the latest, most reliable storage technology available," said
Carella. "Because of the ISEs in this new system, we should essentially
eliminate drive failures and lower our maintenance costs. We’ve never
seen anything like it."

For Rick Young, network systems manager at Texas A&M University
College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, high-speed,
reliable IT systems are a necessity. The college is turning to an
Emprise 5000 system to provide high-performance replication for its
intensive email system. "The Emprise 5000 system is providing us with
very impressive throughput and greater reliability than I thought
possible," said Young. "With the new system I no longer have to deal
with failed disks. Rather, the ISE takes care of everything, so it will
automatically fire up, move data if needed, do a repair, and move the
data back, without ever going offline. Plus, we can add ISEs and/or
upgrade to Emprise 7000 to meet additional storage demands. It’s really
impressive."

Microsoft is another early adopter of the technology as well as a
Xiotech partner. "We recognize scale, reliability and performance are
key attributes that customers seek as they manage ever-expanding
capacity" said Bala Kasiviswanathan, director of storage solutions
marketing at Microsoft. "The Xiotech systems offer a solution to
address these challenges. We look forward to working with Xiotech to
test and find opportunities to deliver value to our customers based on
Windows platforms."

Early adopter and Xiotech reseller partner Nth Generation has tested
the technology for 18 months and has had 100 percent uptime. Rich
Baldwin, Nth Generation chief executive officer, "The performance is
more than double of any other equivalent product that we have tested in
our lab."

ISE Technology Serves as New Storage Foundation
The Intelligent Storage Element technology is the product of years of
development by the Advanced Storage Architecture group at Seagate
Technology. Xiotech acquired this group in November 2007 and shortly
thereafter secured $40 million in funding to help bring the Emprise
product line to market. The ISEs for the Emprise 5000 and Emprise 7000
systems are available in high-performance (2.2TB), balanced (4.8TB) and
high-capacity (16TB) configurations.

Industry analysts and experts agree that the more capacity added,
the greater the risk for disk failures. The unique design of the ISE
with preventive and remedial capabilities addresses this challenge and
provides reliability that is more than 100 times greater than the
typical drive or drive enclosure. The ISE contains two sealed and
service-free DataPacs, redundant power and cooling, battery backup for
up to 96 hours of protection and redundant Managed Reliability
Controllers, which provide RAID, cache and drive management locally. In
addition, the ISE features highly efficient code for increased
performance and self-healing capabilities with proprietary drive repair
and remanufacturing technology for extended DataPac life.

Unprecedented Reliability
Xiotech has been running 208 ISEs with 5,900 spindles for 15 months out
of Xiotech’s facility in Colorado Springs, Colo. During this time there
have been zero service events.

Xiotech partner EVault, the trusted expert in comprehensive data
protection solutions for over 20,000 small to large enterprise
customers globally, has tested the technology for more than a year. "We
are very intrigued by the self-healing architecture built into the
ISE," said Jake McClean, senior director of IT and Operations at
EVault. "As an industry pioneer in delivering backup and recovery
Storage (or Software) as a Service, it’s imperative we have extremely
high uptime. We’ve been using the ISE in our development lab to test
various applications, including our own data vaulting products, and
there have been zero service events thus far. The technology is
demonstrating an impressive level of reliability."

Industry Leading Performance
Tests validated by the SPC show Xiotech leading the industry in
performance per dollar. In the SPC-1 benchmark, measuring IOPS,
Xiotech’s system bested 46 other disk-based systems with a cost of just
$3.53 per SPC-1 IOP. The average for the entire group was $14.12. In
the SPC-2 benchmark, measuring cost per MBps, Xiotech achieved a
storage performance of $32.25 per MBps, ahead of all other 25 systems
tested, and compared to a collective average of $175.28.

Xiotech Corporation