Milliman Care Guidelines Acquires Xiotech Emprise 7000

Xiotech Corporation announced that Milliman Care Guidelines
selected Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage system, powered by Intelligent
Storage Element Technology (ISE), to support its virtualization
initiative. Milliman Care Guidelines will use the Emprise system, along
with Xiotech’s Web Services-based ICON Manager and Virtual View, to
simplify storage monitoring, management and provisioning tasks as the
organization virtualizes its 40 physical servers.

Located in Seattle, Milliman Care Guidelines independently develops and
produces evidence-based clinical guidelines and software used by more
than 1,000 hospitals, providers and health plans. With 40 servers
running at only 5 percent capacity each, the organization needed to
improve server utilization and decided to move to a virtualized storage
and server environment.

"Emprise 7000 provides the high performance and reliability we
need, along with great integration for our virtualized IT environment," said Milliman Care Guidelines Senior Network Administrator Holly Palmer. "We
are really impressed by how easy it is to allocate storage across the
array, server and virtual environments with ICON Manager’s Virtual View
feature. We simply select the virtual machine and specify how much
storage the system should provision. ICON Manager does all the work
quickly behind the scenes, eliminating the time-consuming steps we
otherwise would have to perform across multiple consoles."

Virtual View, a plug-in to Xiotech’s ICON Manager, uses
industry-standard Web Services to enable administrators to manage
storage across the array, server and virtual environments from a single
interface. As a result, organizations have a global view of the three
storage layers (array, ESX and virtual machine) along with automated
provisioning across the layers – all from a single console. With
Virtual View, Milliman Care Guidelines will be able to manage its
storage faster and more easily, while reducing the risk of
misconfigurations.

The Emprise 7000 storage system, with its self-healing ISE technology,
also will serve as an integral component of the company’s disaster
recovery initiative, serving as the central repository for all of the
organization’s critical applications and data. To further ensure
business continuity, Milliman Care Guidelines will replicate all of the
Emprise data to an off-site location.

Xiotech’s Emprise 7000 storage system is built on patented ISE
technology, which includes a combination of preventive and self-healing
capabilities. 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. In addition, ISE technology
provides greatly improved and simplified scalability by pooling storage
into a singular element that is 10 to 20 times the capacity of a
typical disk drive, with the internal processing power and cache needed
to handle all drive management functions.

The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) and is
managed by dual, clustered storage controllers. It includes the Web
Services-based ICON Manager with its Virtual View integration
capabilities for managing virtualized environments, optimal storage
virtualization, a distributed cluster architecture and Intelligent
Provisioning. The system also supports Xiotech’s suite of data
replication solutions.