Xiotech HDD/SSD Combo A Price/Performance Powerhouse

In its latest Magic Quadrant for Midrange and High-End Modular Disk Arrays, Gartner cautioned Xiotech that it needed to grow its revenues and market share "before competitors can provide reliability comparable to ISE," as well as add an SSD (solid-state disk, or flash drive) option. Looks like Xiotech has addressed both points with the newest addition to its ISE (Intelligent Storage Element) family.

The Hybrid ISE combines both hard disk drives and SSDs in a 3U (5.25 inch) form factor that provides more than 60,000 input/output operations per second. The system can scale to almost 900,000 IOPS in a rack, with 14.4Tbytes of usable capacity, for a starting price of $100,000. This price includes the Continuous Adaptive Data Placement feature, a fully automated tool that uses return on investment calculations from weighted IO counts to begin tiering within 1 minute of IO and continues to manage the performance requirements of applications in real time. The company also addresses any SSD reliability concerns with its active and passive recovery-oriented storage methods and a five-year hardware warranty.

According to Xiotech executives, storage performance has been trailing capacity growths. Based on its research, 46 percent of organizations say business applications need a five times or more performance increase over what their current storage provides. The company says that we're at the next stage of evolution of the storage industry, focused on performance, not capacity.

Jon Toigo, CEO and managing principal, Toigo Partners, calls the Hybrid ISE platform one of the few intelligent applications of FlashSSD to storage that he's seen. "Basically, Xiotech has chosen not to make SSD a target for initial writes. [Tier 0, as some vendors call it.]. Instead, they are using it in a way that integrates tightly with their approach to balancing I/O across their system and with their management approach, which is based on Web services and REST [REpresentational State Transfer, which Xiotech calls a game changer that eliminates vendor lock-in]."

The really cool thing, says Toigo, is that this hybrid storage operation is also monitored and recorded by the on-board management facility and presented, via RESTful API, to ISE Analyzer. "ISE Analyzer captures historical data and analyzes it so that guidance can be provided on the characteristics of storage required by an application. Thus, when a customer is deploying storage behind an application, the system can advise about the flavor of storage that should be provided to the app by the admin. Add this to the other outstanding features of ISE, including managed reliability and the most cost-effective warranty in the business, and you have a winning combination."Xiotech ISE blows the socks off the competition, says Toigo, although he cautions that great technology does not succeed without great marketing. "Once articulated, their value proposition--reduced cost, reduced risk and greater operational efficiency of storage--resonates with consumers, especially today."

Toigo says he also wonders how the company can make money "if they sell bullet-proof storage at a lower price than their competitors and with a five year warranty and maintenance agreement that reflects the fact that these rigs are like Timex watches. [They take a licking and keep on ticking.] I mean, where is the after-sale revenue from service calls and replacement parts? Their response to me is always the same: sell more storage. When a customer is delighted with a product, they will keep going back to the same source for more. That's probably true."

While also giving high marks to the overall system architecture, use of SSDs and price/performance, IDC research manager Noemi Greyzdorf notes that enterprise customers often buy products based not only on the price-per-performance parameter but on other features and services. "Xiotech definitely delivers a viable option for those building out pools of storage in support of services, multitenancy, based on virtualization, but in terms of the overall competitive impact, in the enterprise, it won't be earth-shattering."

As for the company's continued success and independence, she sees it as a prime acquisition target but is unsure if there is anyone left, immediately, to make the acquisition. "With the right strategy, partners and message, Xiotech has an opportunity to continue to expand its customer base and brand awareness. If done right when it is acquired, it will be worth a lot more than it is today."

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