Knight Transportation Selects Xiotech

Xiotech Corporation announced that Knight Transportation implemented two Emprise 5000 storage systems, powered by Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, to support its order fulfillment and logistics management systems. Knight Transportation selected the Emprise 5000 systems bundled with DataCore’s SANmelody software to build a customized, high-availability and virtualized IT network.

Knight Transportation, headquartered in Phoenix, is one of North America’s largest trucking companies offering dry van, refrigerated and brokerage services through a network of 47 service centers and branches in the United States. With 650 employees at its offices, and more than 3,700 trucks, Knight Transportation needs an IT infrastructure that offers the highest reliability to keep employees connected and shipments on the road. The organization identified Emprise 5000 with its self-healing ISE technology, bundled with DataCore’s SANmelody software for real-time replication between the systems, as the best strategic storage investment. This partnership between Xiotech and DataCore is made possible through Xiotech’s ISE Powered Alliance Program, which enables best-of-breed, purpose-built storage solutions.

"With our business systems running in a virtualized environment, a storage failure means files and services are inaccessible to employees, and work doesn’t get done," said Knight Transportation Systems Manager Shawn Smith. "In terms of lost revenue for the company, a failure carries the potential cost of tens of thousands of dollars. We recognized the need for a reliable, fast, cost effective solution, and our research revealed the Emprise 5000 system with SANmelody software was the most powerful business continuity solution available."

"Knight Transportation is an excellent example of an organization using our Emprise 5000 storage system to its full capability," said Xiotech Vice President of Marketing Mike Hoch. "Emprise 5000 is the ideal storage foundation building block, because it delivers 100 percent usable capacity and more performance with less hardware through its ISE architecture. These features enable us to pair the system with other top technologies to create best-of-breed, purpose-built solutions for users, which add the highest possible value to their data centers."

Knight Transportation has configured its two Emprise 5000 storage systems to replicate data to each other and support 50 virtual machines. If a virtual machine becomes corrupted or an interruption in service occurs, the second Emprise 5000 system automatically picks up where the primary system left off. The organization’s previous storage system, in this situation, would have required IT staff to restore the virtual machines from tape – an arduous process with a significant negative impact to operations.

"Compared to other vendors, we saved money up front by buying the Emprise 5000 systems, and we expect more great cost savings from the system’s five-year warranty," Smith added. "We also noticed a performance increase. We are fully confident now that Xiotech can serve our needs – this is one of the best IT purchases I’ve ever made."

Emprise 5000 is a self-enclosed, virtual storage building block 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 scales linearly, so that two systems roughly double the performance of one. Xiotech offers a five-year hardware warranty for the Emprise 5000.

ISE technology, the basis for Xiotech’s Emprise 5000 storage systems, significantly minimizes disk-related service events through a combination of preventive and self-healing capabilities. It offers 100 percent usable storage capacity with no vendor holdbacks or drops in performance, and achieves the industry’s most efficient performance and scalability. In addition, it enables users to cut their ongoing storage costs in half through its five-year warranty and lower overall management costs.

To enhance the functionality of the Emprise 5000 systems, Xiotech established the ISE-Powered Alliance Program, which is designed to build an ecosystem of storage products that interoperate, integrate with and are optimized for Xiotech’s ISE technology. DataCore, a member of the ISE-Powered Alliance Program, offers its hardware-independent, software based virtualization and storage area network applications to Xiotech customers and partners to provide high-performing and cost-effective storage implementations.