X-IO's developments in data storage

X-IO is a relatively new name to the New Zealand market, but the company is doing some exciting work in the data storage sector. We met the vendor at WestCon Group's recent Imagine conference.

The company was founded in 2002 as the Seagate Advanced Storage Architecture division. It was established to develop an innovative storage solution that would maintain high availability, improve speed, increase reliability and performance, and significantly reduce the typical power consumption and footprint of existing data storage systems.

This resulted in the development of the Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), a plug-and-perform storage system that uses a wide variety of hard drives and SSD. It was specifically built for the cloud.

The system is designed for applications requiring between 40 and 800 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for each 100 GB of storage provisioned. In other words, it is the minimum amount of capacity and minimum performance characteristics required by an application to operate effectively displayed as a performance/capacity metric.

Its free-frame model allows X-IO’s ISEs to be managed by any element in the software environment chosen by the customer. This could be the operating system, database management system or the application itself.

X-IO’s ISEs also have the benefit of being self-healing. Drive failures are handled and repaired inside the ISE without disrupting or reducing the capacity available to applications or the rated IOPS available to those applications. Because of this, X-IO offers a five-year-standard warranty on its products, one of the only storage vendors to do so.

In 2011 the company launched the Hyper ISE, one of the first flash enabled hybrid storage arrays. It combines SSD and HDD as a single pool of storage, and uses Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) software which only puts hotspot data onto SSD if performance gains will be achieved. If not, then the data is kept on HDD.

The company was set up with innovation in the data storage sector in mind and continues to lead the field.

X-IO is distributed in New Zealand by Westcon Group.