Xiotech Introduces Intelligent Application Storage

Xiotech Corporation unveiled its vision and roadmap to deliver the market’s first and only solution for Intelligent Application Storage.

Evolving application intelligence has created direct conflicts with legacy storage management, resulting in decreased performance, increased complexity and rising costs. The Intelligent Application Storage architecture removes the barriers and empowers business applications to manage, scale and seize control of storage environments to deliver unparalleled performance, efficiency, reliability and business agility.

The key pillars of the Intelligent Application Storage architecture are:

• application-based, scale-out storage building blocks;
• an application-based management platform; and
• an integrated application/storage API.

"The storage industry has failed customers for holding onto an architecture that couldn’t keep pace with the times – and that ends today," said Xiotech President and CEO Alan Atkinson. "The Intelligent Application Storage era will no longer require customers to be accepting of storage inefficiencies and device failures. Intelligent Application Storage solutions will unlock traditional and virtual application performance, deliver linear scalability, maximize utilization, minimize provisioning and management complexity and vastly reduce cost of ownership. Through our groundbreaking technology and partnerships, we are not only delivering on the Intelligent Application Storage imperative, but also taking on the role of a ‘trusted advisor’ for development to partners and enterprises worldwide."

With Xiotech’s revolutionary Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology as the core building block, the company is replacing the legacy storage conventions that impede data movement and increase costs, and providing the next-generation tools, technologies and best practices from the ground up. As a result, organizations of any size can integrate, compute, network and intelligent storage resources to enable an environment that is seamlessly managed by Oracle, Microsoft Exchange and Citrix XenServer applications to deliver optimized performance.

"Xiotech’s Intelligent Application Storage architecture is more than a collection of relevant words. It directly encapsulates a necessary and refreshing change in storage, and seeks to make storage a cooperative partner to applications rather than a potentially combative issue," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The traditional pain-points of storage – including growth, reliability and flexibility – are only exacerbated in today’s increasingly virtualized environments, and they cannot be alleviated by the management friction that is endemic in many traditional IT environments. Xiotech’s contribution can be misinterpreted as simply delivering its rock-solid – and now market-proven – ISE hardware; although true, this misses the larger and more important point that with its architecture Xiotech is no longer embroiled with operating systems and vendors in a battle for who controls the storage environment. Instead, the company is saying clearly that applications rule, and that the role of storage is – in essence – to be as invisible as possible. This ‘cloak of invisibility’ itself demands significant development and complexity, but is aimed squarely at supporting applications optimally rather than debating storage management ownership."

A Strategic Approach to Storage
Explosive data growth has outstripped the legacy storage infrastructure, requiring costly over-provisioning of resources to overcome a significant performance bottleneck. Storage vendors have exacerbated this issue by continuing to layer software functionality in the controller – much of which customers do not use. However, they do pay for it, both in dollars and system drag. Offering a fresh approach to this well-entrenched business reality, Xiotech’s Intelligent Application Storage solutions represent a necessary, fundamental shift away from a technical controller-based, and toward a more strategic ‘application storage cloud-based,’ approach.

Xiotech’s Intelligent Application Storage architecture
innovation pillars are instantiated by:

• Emprise 5000 – based on ISE, this scalable, flexible storage building block offers low total cost of ownership, delivers more than 100x the reliability of traditional disk drives and is backed by an unprecedented five-year, ‘zero-touch’ warranty. Featuring PowerNAP functionality, enabling more efficient power consumption based on business needs, coupled with a 30 percent smaller footprint than traditional storage devices, this storage blade is the ideal foundational storage element.
• ICON Manager – an industry-first user interface integrating storage management and storage-related server administration in a single console. With simple point-and-click operation, users can efficiently manage server, storage, virtual and physical components and monitor system health information. ICON Manager’s first-of-a-kind intelligent provisioning capabilities enable automatic storage capacity increase based on user policies – eliminating the over-subscription risk that plagues traditional storage systems.
• An integrated Web services-based API, which allows other systems to control ISE for storage allocation and operations ease, including: hypervisors for storage provisioning or data migration; applications for information-driven performance requests; and internally developed custom scripts or applets.

Underscoring its commitment to deliver on the promise of Intelligent Application Storage, Xiotech has assembled an unparalleled team of storage technology architects – many of whom helped create and define the previous storage foundations. The team, including industry luminary Richie Lary as a corporate fellow, brings to bear expertise from EMC, Seagate and IBM and holds 240 foundational storage patents. In addition to guiding Xiotech’s technology development, these ambassadors will also be an integral part of enabling IT architects within every one of Xiotech’s customers – to change not only the way their companies deploy and manage storage, but also to drive transformational change in the industry status quo.

ISE – The Building Block of Storage
Xiotech’s ISE technology delivers the industry’s highest-performing and most reliable application-oriented data storage — ideal for server and desktop virtualization. ISE storage blades enable 100 percent usable storage capacity, while maintaining optimal performance as drives approach full utilization. Notably, due to efficiencies inherent in ISE, Xiotech allows organizations to scale their storage infrastructures with unprecedented flexibility and cost effectiveness.