30 Organizations Purchased Xiotech Emprise

Xiotech Corporation announced more than 30 organizations purchased either the Emprise 7000 system or Emprise 5000 system in the company’s second quarter, which ended June 27, 2008.

New Emprise customers include Argus Information & Advisory Services; Bowman and Brooke LLP; Capital Institutional Services, Inc. (CAPIS); City of Corona (California); Department of Transportation: State of Kansas; Forbes Energy Services; Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD); Nuconsteel; University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; and YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis and Greater St. Paul.

Xiotech introduced the Emprise product line, powered by patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, in April. In less than three months, dozens of organizations selected the new storage systems to help them meet performance, reliability and scalability needs while ensuring a low total cost of ownership and drastically reduced service and maintenance costs. Xiotech certifies the new technology with a five-year hardware warranty.

Bowman and Brooke, a national law firm that had previously purchased Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D systems was one of the new customers, selecting two Emprise 7000 storage systems and one Emprise 5000 storage system.

"While IT people use the word innovator to describe Xiotech, it was the reputation for quality products and service which sold me on the first product we purchased," said Michael D. Cammack, chief information officer, Bowman and Brooke LLP. "In the many years we have been business partners, Xiotech has never let me down. The new ISE technology is truly revolutionary and when Xiotech tells me the product will give me five years of flawless service — I know it will."

With nearly 150,000 residents, the City of Corona is located 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles in Riverside County. The city has been a Xiotech customer since 2001 and selected the Emprise 5000 system to house its critical databases.

"We purchased the Emprise 5000 storage system because of the five-year zero cost hardware warranty, excellent support team and industry-leading performance," said Al Farland, telecom manager for the city. "Our next step is to start our virtualization initiative, which the Emprise system will directly support."

The YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis and Greater St. Paul purchased an Emprise 5000 system to replace server-attached storage, which was difficult to administer and challenging to back up. In addition data growth was occurring unevenly across applications, so the organization had poor utilization on some systems, while other systems would run out of capacity.

"We chose the Emprise 5000 system because it provides us with more effective and efficient data storage, and gives us the ability to easily integrate new technologies as we need them," said Robert Haight, help desk supervisor, YMCA of Metropolitan Minneapolis and Greater St. Paul. "With Emprise 5000 we’re confident we have a more reliable and faster system that will scale to meet our future needs."

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) 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 with Virtual View for managing virtualized environments, a distributed cluster architecture, intelligent provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.

The Emprise 5000 system is a self-enclosed, virtual storage system that can be attached to servers either directly or via a Fibre Channel switch. Three storage tiers are available, with a maximum capacity of 16 terabytes. Performance scales linearly, so that two systems roughly double the performance of one.

Xiotech’s Emprise storage systems are built on patented ISE technology, which eliminates virtually all disk-related service events, through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. This means customers never have to worry about drive failures — a commitment Xiotech backs with a five-year hardware warranty. ISE technology also overcomes performance issues of traditional data storage systems by tightly integrating drive, enclosure and controller software, and by distributing much of the processing and cache into the enclosure. And ISE technology provides greatly improved and simplified scalability by pooling storage into a singular element that is 20 to 40 times the capacity of a typical disk drive, with the internal processing power and cache needed to handle all drive management functions.

"When we announced the Emprise systems and ISE technology in April, we stated it was game changing," said Mike Hoch, vice president of Marketing at Xiotech. "We’re thrilled to see that the market agrees. The response from existing and new customers is greater than we could have expected."