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November 18, 2009

Xiotech goes SSD

Filed under: Storage — Tags: , , — Nate @ 8:00 am

Just thought it was kind of funny timing. Xiotech came to my company a few weeks ago touting their ISE systems, about the raw IOPS they can deliver(apparently they do something special with the SCSI protocol that gets them 25% more IOPS than you can normally get). I asked them about SSD and they knocked it saying it wasn’t reliable enough for them(compared to their self healing ISEs).

Well apparently that wasn’t the case, because it seems they might be using STEC SSDs in the near future according to The Register. What? No Seagate? As you may or may not be aware Xiotech’s unique features come with an extremely tight integration with the disk drives, something they can only achieve by using a single brand, which is Seagate(who helped create the technology and later spun it out into Xiotech). Again, The Register has a great background on Xiotech and their technology.

My own take on their technology is it certainly looks interesting, their Emprise 5000 looks like a great little box as a standalone unit. It scales down extremely well. I’m not as convinced with how well it can scale up with the Emprise 7000 controllers though, they tried to extrapolate SPC-1 numbers from a single ISE 5000 to the same number of drives as a 3PAR T800 which I believe still holds the SPC-1 record at least for spinning disks anyways. Myself I’d like to see them actually test a high end 64-node ISE 7000 system for SPC-1 and show the results.

If your a MS shop you might appreciate Xiotech’s ability to integrate with MS Excel, as a linux user myself I did not of course. I prefer something like perl. Funny that they said their first generation products integrated with perl, but their current ones do not at the moment.

This sort of about face with regards to SSD in such a short time frame of reminds me when NetApp put out a press release touting their de-duplication technology as being the best for customers only to come out a week later and say they are trying to buy Data Domain because they have better de-duplication technnology. I mean I would of expected Xiotech to say something along the lines of “we’re working on it” or something. Perhaps the STEC news was an unintentional leak, or maybe their regional sales staff here was just not informed or something.

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