Monthly Archives: July 2010

In April 2010 Xiotech launched our CorteX (RESTful) architecture and one of the first things we rolled out to show the power of RESTful was our iPhone/iPad monitoring app.  It was a great success and really spoke to the power of a simple, easy to write to, open architecture.  We then took it to the next level and created a website www.CorteXDeveloper.com and encouraged people to sign up and participate.  So what’s next? 

The thing we hear most in the storage industry is the need for robust reporting tools for the array’s these customers are running.  With that said, we created a product called ISE Analyzer based on our CorteX RESTful API.  This robust API gives us some really unique capabilities.  ISE Analyzer gives our customers:

• Dynamic User Interface based on Microsoft Silverlight
• Quick View Status & Drill Down of their ISE, Servers and Storage Volumes
• ISE Network Discovery – which is great in Storage Clouds
• Data Analysis via Export – ability to export data into just about anything you need.
• Visibility of historical data – trending etc
• Local Alert Notification

The ability for customer to get their hands around all of their ISE’s they have in their environment, performance information as well as capacity planning is HUGE.  These ISEs could be deployed as standalone systems, integrated into Emprise 9000, Emprise 7000, ISE NAS, or even behind third-party storage virtualizes. It really continues our discussion around using ISE as a storage foundation.  Here are a couple of screen shots to look over.

The above screen shot gives a nice home screen.

What’s really cool is ISE Analyzer doesn’t have to be installed at a customer’s site.  From a service provider point of view, it can be installed in a monitoring site and the system can collect the information from many different locations or customers.  Ie) Service Provider wants to offer up a service around monitoring ISE’s at their customer locations.  ISE Analyzer gives them that ability.  This is fantastic for the SMB space who doesn’t have a 24/7 support staff.  We have also run into “dark sites” that don’t allow alerting/reporting to flow outside the firewall.  This solution would be perfect for them as well !!

I should also point out that we offer 2 kinds of ISE Analyzer.  We have the ISE Analyzer Software Service (SaaS) which comes as part of our zero cost, 5-year hardware maintenance contracts as well as an appliance based that is installed at a customer’s (or partners) location.  The big difference between the two is the ISE Analyzer Software Service is accessible via our customer portal and is based on a 24 hour period.  The Appliance based solution, due in large part to our RESTful API can do real-time performance trending.  The great news is, if you choose the appliance based solution, you also have the SaaS solution as well!!

So, if you currently running ISE’s and you want to monitor them, make sure you reach out to your account team.  Tell them StorageTexan sent you for a 10% discount HAHAHA 🙂  Also, if you are looking at Xiotech for your future storage needs, this will be a fantastic tool to help you better understand your utilization rates.

@StorageTexan

If you look up Emprise in the Merriam-Webster dictionary you will see that it means “an adventurous or daring enterprise.”   That pretty much describes the Emprise product family’s launch 2 years ago.  We did something that no one else was, or is doing today.  Imagine being able to start from scratch on a storage solution, and I’m not talking about controller software.  I’m talking a complete re-engineering/architecting a solution that is built with enough resiliencies to offer the only zero-cost 5-year hardware warranty in the storage industry.  Not only is it super reliable, but it’s ridiculously fast and predictable.  When you can support 600+ Virtual Desktop (Performance VDI) “bootstorm” instances at a whopping 20 IOPS per bootup in 3U of space, I would classify that as wicked fast!!!  

In those 2 years we have not sat around on our laurels.  Steve Sicola’s team, headed up by our VP of Technology David “Gus” Gustavsson, has really outdone themselves with our latest Emprise product launch.  Not only did we move our entire user interface from “Web Services” to a RESTful API (ISE-Manager (blog about this later) and our iPhone/iPad App), he also released our 20(ea) 2.5” disk drive DataPac which has 40(ea) 2.5” drives in 3U of space for about 19.2TB’s space and a TON of performance.  His team also released our ISE Analyzer (advanced reporting solution built on our CoreteX/RESTful API (www.CorteXdeveloper.com )– I’ll blog about that soon) and our next release of our Emprise product family, the Emprise 9000.  I swear his team doesn’t sleep!!!

 So, the Emprise 9000 is a pretty unique solution in the market.  Today, when you think “scale out” architecture the first thing you might think about is NAS.  Hopefully our ISE NAS !!  We hope moving forward you will also think of our Emprise 9000.  The Emprise 9000’s ability to scale to 12 controllers puts it way above the 8 controllers the 3PAR solution scales to and above the 2-controllers the rest of the storage world produces (EMC Clariion, Compellent, HP EVA, IBM XIV etc).  When married with our Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) it truly gives our customers the most robust, scalable solution in the storage market today.  

Let’s be clear, the Emprise 9000 is not just a controller update.  It’s a combination of better, faster controllers, RESTful API and our ISE technology combined to solve performance starved applications issues like Virtual Desktops, Exchange, OLTP, Data Warehouse, Virtual Servers as well as various other types of applications found in datacenters today.  The ability to give predictable performance whether the solution is 10% utilized, or 97% utilized is a very unique feature.  Did I mention it comes with our free zero-cost hardware maintenance?  24x7x365 !!!

So for those keeping a tally at home, and for those competitors that want a little more information on what the Emprise 9000 can do, here is a quick list: (this is not all the features)

• Each controller has a Dual quad-core Nehalem CPU’s!!
• Scale-out to 12 Controller pairs
• 8Gb Fibre Channel ports
  • N-Port Virtualization (NPIV)
• 1Gb or 10Gb iSCSI ports                (10GB later this quarter)
  • You can run both FC and iSCSI in the same solution.
• Scalable from 1 to 96(ea) ISE’s of any size
  • Max capacity would be 1.8PB with 96(ea) 19.2 TB ISE’s
• Support for greater then 2TB LUNS
  • Up to 256TB size LUN
• Thin Provisioned Volumes
• Snapshots
  • READ only Snapshots
  • Writeable Snapshots as well. Think “smart-clone” technology of VDI
• Heterogeneous Migration
  • You want to migrate off that EMC, HP, 3PAR, HDS, etc – we can do it natively in our storage controllers.
• Sync/Async native IP or FC replication

So, as you can see it’s a pretty impressive list!!  And as with all new products, we will be adding new features pretty quickly so stay tuned to announcements from us around the 9000.  BUT there’s more!!  But I can’t really go into it today 🙂  Just stick around a couple of months for some even cooler stuff Gus’s team will be rolling out.   I just got back from a week in Vegas getting feed by a firehose about all the stuff we will be rolling out by the end of the year.  WOW !!  Impressive to say the least !!! 🙂

@StorageTexan ß-Follow me on Twitter