Xiotech ISE Continuous Availability

Xiotech Corporation announced ISE Continuous Availability, enabling non-stop application availability across a metro area and delivering business continuity.

ISE Continuous Availability delivers an active-active, multi-site storage infrastructure without added storage software licensing costs, solution complexity or support requirements.

Historically, achieving continuous availability was reserved for heavily regulated applications with zero tolerance for latency or downtime, such as trading desks and online banking. To ensure availability at that level required massive investments in hardware, software licensing, and a complex and substantial technical support infrastructure. Organizations that could not afford or manage to these requirements accepted potential downtime by deploying a less-costly replication infrastructure. As a result, when disruptions occurred, the time to fully recover and resynchronize applications could extend to hours.

"Xiotech has changed the rules around array-based data protection by adding a native high availability clustering to storage," said Jon Toigo, CEO of consumer ombudsman and industry watchdog Toigo Partners International. "We have always tended to prefer hardware-agnostic, software-based solutions for data protection for three basic reasons. On-hardware data mirroring typically went hand in hand with performance reduction, limitations on our ability to confirm that replication processes were working and that the right data was being replicated, and of course, vendor lock-in arising from the fact that the same vendor’s gear needed to be used at both ends of the link. However, Xiotech’s approach eliminates performance impact and provides great visibility into the mirroring process in real-time."

Toigo continued: "As for vendor lock-in, I would be hard-pressed to think of a better storage array in the market today than the ISE storage blade. Bottom line, Xiotech is changing our minds. Moreover, this new addition to the innovative approach that Xiotech has taken with ISE portends bigger things ahead in terms of infrastructure intelligence. Frankly, I am watching this story unfold with great anticipation."

ISE Continuous Availability brings hig level of storage availability for all mission-critical applications, enabling read and write access to the data regardless of which of the two active storage blades are accessed. Due to the active-active nature of the product, there is minimal configuration and maintenance, and storage failover procedures are eliminated. ISE Continuous Availability enables virtual and physical servers to remain connected to their data, irrespective of network failures, storage volume (LUN) failures or other disruptive events.

"We take it for granted when applications work, until they don’t. The bottom line is that most storage requires constant care and feeding to ensure continuous availability," said Steve Sicola, Xiotech CTO. "ISE was designed to be storage that is invisible and just works. With ISE Continuous Availability we are extending the true active-active nature of an ISE storage blade across an entire ISE infrastructure – that reaches across the datacenter, the campus, or even a metro area. This is about ISE driving application uptime and powering real business continuity."

ISE Continuous Availability
meets the following key requirements:

• Implementing a cost-effective, active-active mirroring solution between any given storage volume and the virtual/physical servers to which it connects, providing read and write access to both mirror members
• Providing Fibre Channel-based synchronous communications between ISE storage blades to ensure data availability
• Eliminating the need for ‘like-to-like’ ISE storage blades at the primary and remote sites to replicate storage volumes (LUNs). Any ISE blade on the network can be used as the mirror for host-presentable, independent copies of storage volumes (LUNs)
• Minimizing the IOPS performance impact during initial synchronization. After synchronization, leverage multi-path load balancing to increase ISE storage blade IOPS performance

ISE Continuous Availability will be available for early customer access in April, and generally available in early Q3 2011.