Xiotech is leading a revolution in storage: all the leading vendors are selling the storage equivalent of mainframes, while Xiotech is building the storage equivalent of blade servers. I'm proud to be associated with them.
Xiotech calls its "storage blade" an ISE — intelligent storage element. Insiders frequently call it "the brick." I’ve
tried to come up with the simplest possible thoughts for explaining an
all-brick approach to storage.
All
SAN’s today are built from two basic things:
- Drive bays or trays. These are the units that actually
hold all the data, and where all the drives are. They include power
supplies, data connectors and logic boards to perform basic functions. - Controllers. This is where the “intelligence” of the
SAN is. The controllers are connected on the “back” side to the drive
bays, and on the “front” side to servers and/or switches. As far as the
servers are concerned, the controllers are the storage. They get
requests from the servers and satisfy those requests by getting data from
various drive bays. Data goes from server to controller to disk when
written, and from disk to controller to server when read.
The
Xiotech innovation with the ISE is to build a new-age drive bay that contains
all the essential functions of the controller, which are:
- read and write my data;
- don’t make me worry about individual disks;
- keep it safe, even if a disk breaks
So
first of all, the Xiotech ISE is a drive bay with built-in essential SAN
functions. But why stop there? If you’re going to concentrate on basics, really
do it right. So the ISE goes way beyond SAN controllers and drive bays
by adding these functions:
- read and write my data really quickly
- don’t make me become an expert to get great results
- don’t charge too much
- it won’t break, so don’t charge me for maintenance.
It’s
important to understand is that the Xiotech ISE looks like a drive bay,
except:
- It fits in 30% less space
- It uses less power
- It requires no maintenance
- It performs better than other systems because of novel,
built-in virtualization
This
supercharged drive bay, the ISE, gives you everything you need from a SAN, without
a controller. Why is this good? Because dropping the controller:
- Saves money
- Results in a linearly scalable system
- Eliminates the drag of features you don’t need
Do
some people really need controllers? Yes. There are some functions that are
performed very well in controllers, and for those functions Xiotech has an
excellent controller, and others are available from third parties.
Do
you need a controller? Here are the reasons you may not:
- You use a server-based LVM to perform higher level
storage functions - You want your application to control its own storage
- You use blade servers, and would like the equivalent of
blades for storage - You’re very concerned about performance, and you need
linear scaling - You want to avoid storage experts and getting into the
whole world of storage; you just want fast, reliable storage - You know about server virtualization, and you want
storage that “fits in” to that style of computing - You’re cost-conscious about storage, including
operating costs and maintenance
Xiotech
is pioneering a new approach to storage – what server farms are for servers,
Xiotech ISE’s are for storage.Obviously, I think it's a winner.