30 Organizations Selected Xiotech Magnitude 3D 4000

Xiotech Corporation announced that more than 30 organizations selected Xiotech Magnitude 3D 4000 storage area network (SAN) systems in the company’s third quarter, which ended Sept. 26, 2008. Some of these new customers include: Health Care Logistics Inc. (Circleville, Ohio); East Central Minnesota Educational Cable Cooperative (Braham, Minn.); VT Industries (Holstein, Iowa); Winslow Indian Health Care Center, Inc. (Winslow, Ariz.); and Bakersfield City School District (California).

Health Care Logistics (HCL) is an online vendor of approximately 6,000 unique healthcare products with 25,000 domestic accounts and international distributors in several countries. HCL Technology Services Director Kurt Wolf said Xiotech stood out for its ability to simplify storage management in virtual server environments, thanks to the Virtual View feature of its innovative ICON Manager user interface.

"ICON Manager integrates with our virtual server environment, so we can easily provision, assign and manage storage for our virtual and physical servers from a single console," Wolf said. "Xiotech also gives us a cost- effective growth path, so we can purchase what we need today and easily scale to accommodate our future needs."

The East Central Minnesota Educational Cable Cooperative (ECMECC) Director Marc Johnson said the Magnitude 3D 4000 storage system is well-suited to school district consortiums. The system provides the reliability and high capacity required while supporting a virtualized storage and server infrastructure, allowing members to share services at a fraction of the cost of implementing the same services to each school individually. The ECMECC is a consortium of 12 school districts and a technical college that uses two-way interactive television to expand educational opportunities for students and community members in East Central Minnesota.

"Xiotech won our business by demonstrating great value, ease of management and quality local support," Johnson said. "The Magnitude 3D 4000 system allows us to offer shared network services to our members, such as off-site data backup. This provides a lot of value for our schools by eliminating the need for them to purchase and maintain their own data storage and backup systems."

Family-owned and operated VT Industries provides laminate countertops and architectural wood doors, and has nine facilities across the United States and Canada. Earlier this year, the company handled a document imaging project that required a sizable amount of storage, and VT Industries’ previous SAN did not provide the capacity or the reliability required.

"We considered upgrading our previous SAN, but when we evaluated Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 system we were very impressed with its ease of use, reliability and scalability," VT Industries’ Director of Information Technology Gary L. Bateman said. "Magnitude 3D 4000 gives us all the capacity we need for our production data, and can scale easily as our needs grow. It will be the foundation for our storage going forward, and we look forward to working with Xiotech on our upcoming disaster recovery plans."

Winslow Indian Health Care Center, Inc. is an ambulatory health center that serves an estimated 17,000 Native Americans. The center installed a SAN from another vendor in 2003, but was not happy with the complexity of the system.

Winslow Indian Health Care Center’s Network Administrator Mark Gerber said: "We chose Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 SAN because it simplified storage. Our legacy system was very difficult to use and, because we’re growing, we need to make frequent configuration changes. After speaking with other Xiotech customers we were convinced that the Magnitude 3D system would be the best fit for our center’s growing needs."

The Magnitude 3D 4000 SAN solution appeals to midsized organizations looking for easy-to-manage storage systems that will adapt as their needs grow and change. Built on a virtualized distributed cluster architecture, it offers valuable features such as the ICON Manager user interface, automatic storage provisioning through Intelligent Provisioning, advanced reporting with Storage Monitor, and simplified integration and customization with Web Services.

The Magnitude 3D 4000 family of storage systems comes in several configurations and includes Virtual View for integrating with server virtualization software to report on and automate storage provisioning and management tasks across the array, physical server and virtual machine storage layers. Additionally, the Magnitude 3D family offers iSCSI and Fibre Channel connections, as well as multiple tiers of storage, enabling organizations to select the network connectivity, capacity and functionality that best meets their business needs.