Xiotech Produced 1,100 ISE Units

One year after launching of its patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, Xiotech Corporation returned to SNW Spring with more than 1,100 ISE units in production.

Xiotech’s launch of ISE last year was the culmination of five years of development within Seagate’s Advanced Storage Architecture group, which Xiotech purchased in 2007, and more than 75 patents for underlying hardware and software advancements. Since then, ISE technology has emerged as a proven and advantageous alternative to traditional disk arrays because of its self-healing, high-performance architecture and the cost savings it delivers with a five-year warranty and 100 percent usable capacity.

"The success of ISE is significant, not just for Xiotech but for the broader market," said Enterprise Strategy Group Senior Analyst Mark Peters. "One hundred or maybe even two hundred production systems might be the usual expectation for something this far from the norm, and might be explained away as simply the natural sales to devotees of the ‘bleeding edge.’ But that’s not where Xiotech has been selling. So to be shipping at an annualized rate of 1,300 systems demonstrates clearly that there are plenty of regular users out there, with regular applications and needs, who are happy to embrace this new way of managing storage."

"The sales and adoption of ISE technology has certainly exceeded our expectations," said Xiotech Vice President of Marketing Mike Hoch. "Prior to ISE, there had been very little innovation in the basics of storage hardware for many years, so the market was ripe for these improvements. The resulting usable capacity, reliability and performance improvements, along with lower operational costs, are really resonating with organizations looking to reduce their total cost of ownership."

ISE technology significantly minimizes disk-related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. It also overcomes performance issues of traditional data storage systems by tightly integrating drive, enclosure and controller software and distributing much of the processing and cache into the enclosure. In addition, ISE provides 100 percent usable capacity with no vendor or hot-sparing capacity holdbacks.

ISE technology is the basis for Xiotech’s Emprise 5000 and Emprise 7000 storage systems, which also were launched at SNW Spring last year. The Emprise 7000 system supports up to 64 ISE (1,024 terabytes) and is managed by dual controllers. It includes capabilities such as Web Services-based storage management via ICON Manager, simplified provisioning and management of storage in virtualized server environments via Virtual View, a distributed cluster architecture, Intelligent Provisioning and a suite of data replication solutions.

Also built on ISE technology, Emprise 5000 is a self-enclosed, virtual storage system that can be attached to servers either directly or via a Fibre Channel switch. Four storage tiers are available, with a maximum capacity of 16 terabytes. Performance is industry-leading and scales linearly, so that two systems roughly double the performance of one. Additionally, the technology provides a solid foundation for purpose-built storage solutions, so that organizations can configure storage solutions for their unique needs.

One of the Emprise customers is Argus Information & Advisory Services LLC, a provider of benchmarking data for financial institutions, including the largest banks and credit card issuers in the U.S. and U.K. With its legacy storage system creating significant performance bottlenecks and anticipated data growth of 500 percent in the coming years, Argus turned to ISE technology and the Emprise 5000 storage systems because they offered the performance and scale the organization required in the most cost-effective way.

"Our primary goal was to increase throughput, and with Emprise 5000 our bottlenecks disappeared," says Argus Information & Advisory Services Principal Nick Daffan. "When we need more power or capacity, we simply add Emprise 5000 systems. We started with 16 systems, and in less than six months expanded to 24 systems with more than 200 terabytes of raw capacity. We are a data warehouse, a decision-support-type shop that has hundreds of jobs and moves about a terabyte of data every day. The Emprise systems’ performance and scalability have exceeded our expectations."