The storage market is as competitive as ever, so vendors need to keep delivering the features that data centers require to meet the ever-increasing demands for performance and capacity. But through the feature war, IT professionals would be wise to make sure the hardware that their storage system uses is up to the task. We may be heading toward a software defined future but that future will rest firmly on a bedrock of storage hardware. X-IO is a company that gets both the hardware and software side of the storage equation.
A Little ISE History
Over six years ago X-IO launched a new series of products that were designed to last for six or more years. They built hardware designed to safely allow hard drives to be densely packed into a storage system, which they called the Intelligent Storage Element (ISE).
ISE was surrounded by software that focused on maintaining data access and integrity, and backed it up with a warranty period of five years, a rarity in the storage industry. The system was also designed to extract maximum performance from hard disk drives.
Later they added flash to ISE with a unique algorithm for tiering that delivered increased efficiency, driving down the amount of flash their systems needed. Plus, if there was a flash-tier miss, the hard drive tier, unlike other hybrid systems, still delivered excellent performance. This meant that a tier miss in the X-IO world was not as noticeable as it might be on other hybrid arrays.
X-IO was unique in that they counted on the operating system, hypervisor or software defined storage to provide features like thin provisioning, snapshots, replication and clones. In essence they become the ultimate hardware solution for SDS vendors.
ISE G3 Launch
In January X-IO delivered a new hybrid array, the ISE 780, that improved performance by 65%, thanks to increased processing power and further improvements in software efficiency. They also broke with their tradition of letting features be added by other vendors. In the G3 release they added new features, including quality of service, thin provisioning and much deeper VMware integration. In our opinion ISE is still one of the best platforms for data centers deploying an SDS solution but these features should help increase its appeal in data centers not ready to make the software defined jump. They also added iSCSI support to increase connectivity options.
The Lion – ISE 800 Series – All-Flash Array
The next step in X-IO’s evolution is their introduction of the ISE 800 Series All-Flash Array. It comes out of the chute ranked #1 in price – performance for all-flash arrays in the independent Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 benchmark.
Flash capacities for the system range from 6.4TBs to 51.2TBs. The ISE 800 Series, like the rest of the ISE product family, offers “100% performance at 100% capacity”, meaning that no matter how much data is storage on the system, performance remains constant. And like the rest of the ISE family, it comes with a 5 year guarantee, a rarity for an all-flash array.
Missing features are data reduction techniques such as deduplication and compression, but for the 800’s target market, OLTP, this is less of a concern. For other markets like virtual server or virtual desktop infrastructures, X-IO feels their 700 series hybrid arrays will provide a similar performance experience to all-flash but will cost significantly less, thanks to the hard drive tier and their ability to tier in real-time
StorageSwiss Take
X-IO as a company has actually been around for a while. If we call them a startup they certainly get points for standing the test of time. Also, they are unique in that they’re one of the few vendors that delivers capacity storage, hybrid storage and all-flash storage from the same basic platform. For X-IO they can focus their all-flash array on the flash sweet spot, OLTP applications, and not make all-flash the solution to every problem. Where hybrid storage is a better fit, they offer their 700 series.
Thanks to both SDS solutions and the build out of their own feature set, X-IO provides the storage services that data centers need. More importantly, they have reached this level while staying focused on building high quality hardware and software that optimizes the life expectancy of the storage system. This is a very unique approach compared with the rest of the industry whose typical ‘go to market’ is to write storage software and throw it on whatever storage hardware is available.
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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