infoTECH Feature

June 29, 2011

Xiotech Provides High-Performance Storage Systems

Xiotech built its systems with cloud and virtual desktop-to-data centers in mind and provides high-performance systems for storage in many innovative ways.

Alan Atkinson, Xiotech’s (News - Alert) president and CEO, explained the company’s past and future during a recent interview with TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani at Cloud Expo 2011.

“Our approach allows you to get much better, sustainable performance,” Atkinson said. “We’re at the forefront of what I think is the next big wave of storage – which is the movement toward solid state.”

Its customers range from mid-market organizations to large enterprises and government organizations. In total, Xiotech has over 1,200 customers – including 28 of the firms listed on the Fortune 50.

Its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) storage blades fill the gap between traditional storage arrays and emerging memory solutions, the company said.

During the first generation of products, the company optimized performance and reliability, according to Atkinson. It was suited for cloud and virtualization, he added. With the second generation, the company introduced the concept of multiple tiers of storage. The products are being used in such fields as banking in New York City, where there is a “mission-critical environment,” Atkinson said.

During the Cloud Expo 2011, Atkinson announced the company’s new Hybrid ISE platform, which he said, “changes the economics for customers’ applications.”

“Hybrid ISE provides SSD performance at HDD pricing, outperforming storage systems that are up to 10 times as expensive,” he added in a recent statement. “Hybrid ISE enables customers to implement new applications, achieve greater levels of consolidation, and frees up capital. Hybrid ISE represents a market shift that alters the economics of IT, opening the floodgates of new opportunities for our users.”

“Hybrid ISE solves a major and pervasive problem in every data center,” added Steve Sicola, Xiotech’s CTO, in a company statement. “Servers are getting faster and the cost of performance continues to go down. Meanwhile, hard drives and storage systems just can’t keep pace and the price of performance keeps going up. This isn’t sustainable. Hybrid ISE restores balance in the data center, representing a major shift in how we implement applications going forward.”

Hybrid ISE was awarded the “Breakthrough Product of the Year” and also was given the “Attendees’ Pick” in the Best of Tech·Ed 2011 awards program.

Atkinson said the awards were “a pretty major thing for us. We’re excited about that.”

Atkinson is an industry veteran, and has a lot of experience with storage. He came to Xiotech from EMC (News - Alert), where he was vice president of the Storage Software Group. He earlier co-founded and was CEO at WysDM Software, which provides data protection management across industries such as financial services, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals. Atkinson was also senior vice president of Engineering and Product Marketing at StorageNetworks. He also worked for Goldman Sachs, where he was Information Technology vice president, and worked at AT&T (News - Alert) Bell Laboratories.


Ed Silverstein is a TMCnet contributor. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
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