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.”

We empower enterprises to drive storage performance to its limits, accelerate business analytics and enable risk-free VDI deployments

The company’s plug-and-perform ISE is designed and built, from the ground up, to address the fundamental requirements for storage in virtualization and database environments such as predictable high performance, full utilization of capacity, incremental-but-limitless scaling, and zero-service-event operation. “We believe storage should be invisible. It should just work. Our ISE storage systems do just that,” says McLaughlin.If the case of storage requirements for VDIis considered, X-IO offers an “X-Pod” solution based upon its ISE technology coupled with CiscoUCS servers. The solution has been specifically designed to help customers ensure that their virtual desktop environments are operating at optimum levels. A great example is Garland Independent School District in TX, one of the company’s client’s. They needed to implement a VDI solution for 58,000 students and 7,300 staff and turned to Cisco and X-IO to implement a complex VDI system, including high performance AutoCAD workstations and VMware Horizon View. By implementing the Cisco / X-IO “X-Pod” combination, AutoCAD rendering time was reduced from 80 to 4 minutes, server deployment time was reduced from 4 days to one hour and time required for updates was reduced from months to half a day.

“Going forward, you’ll see us continue to leverage both new and existing technologies, including flash. We’ll be looking to partner with various media providers to gain more knowledge about their drives and incorporate that knowledge into our arrays,” concludes McLaughlin.