Autovin Purchased Two Xiotech Emprise 7000 Systems

Xiotech Corporation announced that AutoVIN, an international provider of auditing services for automotive manufacturers and finance corporations, purchased two Emprise 7000 storage systems powered by Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology. AutoVIN selected the Emprise 7000 systems for increased performance, reliability and ease of use, and the company expects more than 75 times better I/O per second (IOPS) performance than its previous storage system provided.

Based in Roswell, Ga., AutoVIN provides professional field information services, including vehicle condition reporting, inventory verification auditing, program compliance auditing and facility inspections. The company collects data and images, and must be able to provide accurate, timely information to its customers and keep this data online for seven years. AutoVIN’s previous storage area network (SAN) did not provide the flexibility required to conduct simultaneous activities, such as backups and IT infrastructure upgrades, resulting in customer complaints that the company’s Web site was slow.

"We have more than 1,000 users uploading 50,000 assignments daily, so we faced an enormous performance bottleneck," said AutoVIN’s CTO Chris Dillow. "We conducted a production test of the Emprise 7000 storage system and recorded 50,000 IOPS — the highest we recorded with our previous system was 660 IOPS."

Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage system is built on patented ISE technology, which overcomes performance issues of traditional data storage systems by tightly integrating drive, controller software and cache inside the enclosure. The result is industry-leading, multidimensional performance.

Two other factors key to AutoVIN’s selection of Emprise 7000 were high reliability and easy management. Emprise 7000 minimizes disk-related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. Additionally, its ICON Manager user interface provides the industry’s easiest storage management — integrating with and automating many tasks across the storage system, servers and operating systems.

"Xiotech is focused on making complicated tasks and processes simple," said Dillow. "Emprise 7000 automatically stripes data across multiple ISE, so I don’t need to worry about RAID sets or load balancing. ICON Manager simplifies administration further by automating storage provisioning and management."

AutoVIN will use the Emprise 7000 storage system to host all of its auditing data, which its customers access via the AutoVIN Web site. As a modular storage array, the Emprise 7000 solution offers three DataPac (storage module) configurations: performance, balanced and capacity. AutoVIN selected Performance Tier DataPacs to support its auditing software and Capacity Tier DataPacs for storing images.

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 1,024 terabytes and is managed by dual, clustered storage controllers. It includes all of the capabilities that are currently available on Xiotech’s Magnitude 3D 4000 line, including the Web Services-based ICON Manager and Virtual View for managing virtualized environments, optimal storage virtualization, distributed cluster architecture, Intelligent Provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.