X-IO Technologies: High-Performance Storage for Virtualized IT Infrastructures

“I haven’t seen anything grow as rapidly as storage in IT during my 28 years of technical and marketing experience in storage industry,” says Gavin McLaughlin VP of worldwide marketing at X-IO. As storage is the indispensable part of virtualized computing environments including Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), there is an increased need for cost-effective yet efficient storage systems. “Flash memory comes with faster IOPS (Input / Output Operations Per Second) but is costlier than traditional media with respect to the storage offered. On the other hand, hard disk drives (HDD) offer most storage capacity for the cost, but have slower IOPS,” infers McLaughlin and he adds, “We are here to bridge this gap.”X-IO Technologies has pioneered the only real-time truly hybrid storage system that fuses flash memory and HDDs into a single pool of storage. Named the Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) it offers performance-driven storage with the best price, performance and capacity ratios. “Enterprise-class reliability and ease of use are in X-IO’s DNA. We empower enterprises to drive storage performance to its limits, accelerate business analytics and enable risk-free VDI deployments,” declares McLaughlin.

X-IO’s technology delivers consistent performance which is unique to the storage industry. Noted as the “Fast Forever” feature, the company’s storage systems deliver consistent IOPS even when 99 percent of the storage is used. “When enterprises invest in storage systems, and if the performance decreases during the use of those last gigabytes, then they don’t get what they have paid for. Hence, we allow our customers to enjoy the same performance levels throughout the usage,” states McLaughlin. Additionally, it has become commonplace in the storage industry for a reasonable amount of operational maintenance such as swapping drives, maintaining utilization levels to take place, X-IO’s approach provides true zero-touch operation. “We are the only storage vendors to offer storage which excels its job even in excess of five years of implementation, without ever needing to be touched or managed,” says McLaughlin and adds, “In fact it’s so easy to forget about our storage after it is deployed—people sometimes forget to thank us.”