Tag: ISE

In computing, the transition from mainframes to blades is
well established. What about storage? There is exactly one choice: the Xiotech
ISE.

We throw words around like crazy in computing. Once a word
starts to become associated with something good, every person in marketing in
the universe latches on to that word, and finds a way to associate it with
their product. Most of the analysts aren’t much help here.

The opposite applies, too. Once a word is no longer in fashion,
no vendor admits to selling it, and no buyer admits to owning one. A case in
point is “mainframe.” Some time ago, you had to have a mainframe to be in the
big leagues of computing; otherwise, you were in the minor leagues, dealing
with unimportant problems. Now, even though mainframes are alive and well and
broadly used, it’s hard to get anyone to admit it. “Everyone” knows that
mainframes are old-fashioned.  

In spite of their un-cool-i-tude, let’s talk mainframes for
a quick minute. What’s a mainframe? In computing, it’s a big single thing that
gets all of many big jobs done at the same time. It is your central computing
resource. It’s valuable. It takes lots of time and attention to manage, but
rewards the attention by being the work-horse of your data center. As your
workload grows, your mainframe can start to get overloaded; no problem.
Capacity measurement and planning is a key skill with mainframes, and even
better, mainframes are built to be expanded. That’s why they’re called “main
frame.” It isn’t the CPU – it’s the frame (the main one!) that structures your
computing engines. Sometimes your mainframe needs more compute-power; no
problem, you can add it in. Sometimes your mainframe needs more I/O channels
or local memory; no problem.

What’s cool today, if not mainframes? We all know the
answer: it’s racks and racks of servers or blades. Each one is powerful but
inexpensive. You increase capacity by buying more of them. That’s why
virtualization is such a powerful trend in the data center: VM-Ware (and
similar products) helps you use all those servers more efficiently. Everyone
has lots and lots of servers; therefore, the need to use them as effectively as
possible is ubiquitous; therefore, Hyper-V and its brethren are hot.

What’s going on in the world of storage? Do we have storage
mainframes? Of course not! Heaven forfend! “Mainframes” are the bad old,
un-cool thing, so there’s no way my storage is a mainframe – it’s a SAN, a
storage area network! It’s a network, see, it’s cool!

Now let’s cut through the verbiage, and apply the criteria
of mainframe to storage. A mainframe (see above) is:

• A big single thing that gets all of many big storage jobs
  done at the same time; check.
• Your central storage resource; check.
• It’s valuable; check.
• It takes lots of time and attention to manage; check.
• Capacity measurement and planning is a critical function;
  check.
• You expand capacity by augmenting it, adding things into it;
  check.

There’s a simple rule here. Suppose you buy a “small, simple”
mainframe. When you’ve added huge amounts of capacity to it, how many do you
have? If the answer is “one,” you’ve got a mainframe. If you’ve got a small,
simple server/blade collection, you’ve already got a bunch of them. When you’ve
added loads of capacity, you’ve got loads more of them. You’ve never got just
one. You start with some, you grow to lots, and expand to lots and lots.

Applying our rule to storage, it is undeniable that while vendors
will avoid the “m-word” like crazy, what they’ve all got is storage mainframes.
They are single things, just like a railroad train is a single thing regardless
of the number of engines at the front or freight cars at the back. Even if they
choose to call it “cloud storage,” the brutal fact is that it is still a
monolithic, single, unbroken entity – a mainframe, in short!

There is exactly one vendor in the market who has created
for storage what blades are for computing, and that is Xiotech, with its ISE
product. You do not expand an ISE; you buy another one. Each ISE is a separate,
free-standing, inexpensive but powerful resource, directly connected to a
switch – just like a server.

The Xiotech ISE is the anti-mainframe, and is the
natural choice for server-farm data center storage.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.