NEWS & NOTES
FROM THE THOUGHT LEADERS OF DATA STORAGE
08.25.11
XIO — Fast Forever
XIO means performance-driven storage. Our Hyper ISE storage system represents a breakthrough in price/performance/capacity ratios that literally changes the economics of the data center. This name change represents our new focus, revolutionary products, and our role as a category leader. Hyper ISE is the only storage system that combines SSD and HDD, and can achieve 200,000 IOPS. And you get this performance in a 3U, 14.4 TB storage system. That is a lot of power in a small package.
SSD storage systems are more expensive on a per GB basis. Traditional HDD storage systems are more expensive on a per IOPS basis. And adding SSDs into these systems isn’t really going to lower the cost or improve performance all that much.
Instead of spending hundreds of thousands—and, in some cases, millions—of dollars on big data platforms and accelerators, our customers are using Hyper ISE to improve database performance for a fraction of the cost. Customers successfully implement VDI with up to thousands of virtual desktops running on a single Hyper ISE. And we enable server virtualization 2.0 by breaking the I/O bottleneck, enabling customers to achieving up to 50-to-1 virtual to physical consolidations ratios.
We can no longer ignore the power, cooling, and floor space challenges of the data center. Hyper ISE’s design allows it to efficiently dissipate heat. And, because we use far fewer disk drives to achieve high performance, our power consumption is far less than other storage systems. Add to that the additional floor space savings you get thanks to our compact footprint.
Hyper ISE is fast forever. Performance in other storage systems degrades in over time due to wear and tear, RAID rebuilds, and mirroring operations. Hyper ISE was built to maintain high performance through its entire life cycle while other storage systems fall off a cliff. That is a dirty little secret in the storage world that is rarely talked about.
Our name means performance. XIO.
Tags: Hyper ISE, XIO
Posted in Hyper ISE, XIO News • No Comments
06.23.11
Hyper ISE Buzz
As you know we went GA with Hyper ISE and we are having amazing market traction with our customers and partners. There has been a great deal of media buzz including two articles in TMCnet – “The Future of Faster, Smaller Storage with Hyper Solid-State and Spinning Media and “Interview with XIO“. Other articles include “XIO Unscabbards Go-faster Flash-mungous ISE Blade,” in the Register and “XIO Enhances Data Center Efficiency with Hyper ISE Storage Platform,” in Computer Technology Review. There is also a blog by David Black, Fusion IO and XIO Hyper ISE. And the most recent “XIO’s SSD Strategy: Beat Fusion-io” in TechTarget. Related to Hyper ISE is Steve Duplessie’s blog on the inevitable rise of SSD within enterprise storage.
Tags: ISE, XIO
Posted in XIO News • No Comments
06.13.11
CTO Insight on CloudExpo 2011
The 2011 NYC Cloud Expo was a great experience for me, XIO, and the entire crowd who attended. I was able to dispel myths and explain the realities of Storage and Storage for the Cloud in my keynote as well as the breakout session and technology executive panel.
The response I got from the crowd was encouraging, because just accepting the status quo of storage inefficiency in architecture, design, and back-end costs is NOT in the best interest of any customer. I happy with the hunger for knowledge and after the fact being able to see what has been done to solve this with Hyper ISE and the entire ISE family. It was a great opportunity for us to announce the General Availability of our new Hyper ISE storage platform designed to provide our customer with the best of both worlds — high performance and capacity in one pool of storage.
Here’s a great video interview our CEO, Alan Atkinson conducted at the Cloud Expo event in NYC talking about the rapid adoption of SSD working alongside spinning disk with the help of Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP).
To the Cloud…that can handle thunderstorms of IO!
Posted in Commentary, Hyper ISE, ISE, Industry Trends, XIO News • No Comments
06.09.11
Fusion-io IPO – The Need for Speed
The Fusion-io IPO today is the second most exciting thing to happen in storage this week. The first of course was the Hyper ISE Launch! Having said that, we see the Fusion-io IPO as an important validation for the need for speed. The market rewarded Fusion-io with a healthy surge with a near $2B market cap. The Wall St Journal did point out the good and the bad — one point is Fusion-io gets 91% of their revenue from just 10 customers. And analyst Steve Duplessie isn’t a big fan.
One customer that selected Hyper ISE over Fusion-io told us that we gave him the high performance they required AND the capacity he needed for his application. Additionally, their high performance application was also mission-critical and our reliability and high availability was requisite. On top of that he didn’t want a point solution but something that he could use for multiple applications. When you added it all up it was a no-brainer for this customer.
Posted in Commentary, Hyper ISE, ISE, Industry Trends • No Comments
05.19.11
Xiotech Wins Multiple Awards and Receives Industry Accolades at Tech•Ed 2011
The Best of Tech·Ed Awards Program, produced by Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine, SharePointProConnections and DevProConnections, recognize the innovative products and services showcased at the conference.
It was an exhilarating evening at Microsoft TechEd in Atlanta last night as XIO’s Hyper ISE won TechEd’s Best of TechEd “Breakthrough Product” of 2011. Here is the article posted this AM in WindowsITPro:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/products/teched-2011-award-winners-136192
The “Breakthrough Product” award spans all categories and covers the entire event. There were over 300 Best of TechEd submissions and 46 Finalists that Hyper ISE competed against. Many would argue that this is the most important award of the night. As you can imagine, the entire XIO team and I were thrilled when Hyper ISE was announced as the winner of this incredibly prestigious award.
We didn’t think the evening could get any better.
Immediately following is the Best of TechEd “Attendees’ Pick” award. This award is voted on by TechEd Attendees who have reviewed the Finalists products and voted for the best product at the event (sort of a People’s Choice Award). Once again, Hyper ISE took home the award. After all the effort that the entire company has invested in bringing Hyper ISE to market, these awards provided an incredible boost and underscored the revolutionary status of this new technology.
The XIO team in Atlanta and around the globe is thrilled to win both awards at Microsoft’s largest user conference. If you are in Atlanta at TechEd, make sure to stop by the booth and checkout the Hyper ISE we have available for hand-on demos. Booth #1615!
Tags: Attendees Pick Award, Best of Tech-Ed, Breakthrough Product Award, Hyper ISE
Posted in Commentary, ISE, Industry Trends, XIO News • No Comments
04.14.11
Is your storage small enough?
OK, this needs a starting point. All storage systems have three core attributes for customers to consider in their design and purchasing decisions. 1) Capacity, 2) Performance and 3) Footprint.
The first two, Capacity and Performance, are pretty straight-forward with the questions.
- “How much data do you have or plan to have?”
- “What application is this data used with?”
With the answer to these two questions, most storage vendors can advise you on which of their products make most sense for you. Every enterprise storage product today claims TBs to PBs of capacity and massive IOPS (I/Os per second) of performance.
It’s pretty clear that some storage vendors in the industry can get to 1 million IOPS with their products. The subtle, tricky, and very important question is “In what footprint?” and “With how many hard drives?” The customers I get to talk with frequently are comfortable with multiple 42U equipment racks of legacy storage (think multiple full-size refrigerators here) with thousands of hard drives to get the IOPS performance and capacities their application workloads need… Customers also expect to run these storage solutions for 5 years or more.
“Are you comfortable running multiple full-size refrigerators with thousands of hard drives for 5 years?” I would hope you are not happy with this prospect for your datacenter footprint. Bigger is just not better.
Xiotech ISE products are capable of delivering you the capacity, performance that everyone else can but in most cases with 1/2 the footprint of our competition. 1/2 the footprint means 1/2 the power and 1/2 the cooling costs (over your projected 5 years)…
Further, with our new generation of Hybrid ISE we can cut the footprint down by another large amount. Our Hybrid ISE in just 3U (5.25″) with 20 SSDs and 20 HDDs give you 14.4TBs usable (BTW, Xiotech pays for your hot spare space) with an industry leading 60,000 (estimated) IOPS and we provide a standard 5-year hardware warranty with our ISEs.
Are you attending Microsoft’s TechEd conference in May in Atlanta? If so, stop by and see Hybrid ISE in our booth. We would love to have the opportunity to meet with you and discuss your capacity, performance AND footprint requirements.
- or -
Please call 866-472-6764 or email Runbetter@xiotech.com.
Posted in XIO News • No Comments
08.09.11
The Need for Speed
Posted by Alan Atkinson
We are seeing a real “need for speed” and so is industry analyst Tony Asaro. In his latest article “The Need for Speed” in Storage Magazine he discusses the imbalance in the data center. Servers are getting faster but relatively speaking, storage is not. He does mention us specifically in the article: “XIO has a unique approach with its Hyper ISE product using Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) that creates a single pool of storage from SSDs and hard disk drives (HDDs). Instead of promoting and demoting data based on activity/ inactivity, XIO monitors application performance and places data on SSD or HDD based on whether there will be an actual improvement perceivable to the user. The goal is to ensure that price, performance and capacity are in optimal balance.”
The article is very interesting and makes some important points about how performance optimized storage is a new category of storage that has wide applicability. We are certainly seeing that and it is driven by this imbalance in the data center. Storage has become the bottleneck and the Hyper ISE breaks it.
Posted in Commentary, Homepage Highlight, Hyper ISE, ISE, Industry Trends, XIO News • No Comments