Xiotech Array Pushes The Envelope

The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based vendor has moved from the proprietary processor and controller used in its existing products to dual Xeon processors, said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing. As a result, performance is two to five times better than its predecessor, the Magnitude 3D 1000, he said.

Also new with the 3000 is cache memory that can be set by the user to be available to certain applications and not others, Stolz said. For instance, a database application can access the cache if it needs it to run faster. However, for reference data, where performance is not as critical, it can be set so the cache is not available.

This ability is important for certain applications, especially for governments, Stolz said. "Cache has a security risk or carries a risk of introducing contamination into data," he said.

The 3000 has a maximum capacity of up to 224 hard drives, including Fibre Channel and/or Serial ATA (SATA), in up to eight drive bays, Stolz said. It operates in Windows, NetWare, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and IRIX environments, he said.

David Hiechel, president and CEO of Eagle Software, a Xiotech solution provider in Salina, Kan., said the 3000 pushes the envelope of what the channel can do in the midrange market. "It helps us compete against the EMC CX700," he said.

Hiechel said it is very interesting what Xiotech is doing with cache. "Xiotech has always had no cache in its arrays and instead striped the data across all the drives for performance," he said. "It gives tremendous bandwidth."

The market has been waiting for an array that allows cache to be turned on or off according to the application, he added.

The array is expected to be available to solution providers this week, with a starting price of about $50,000, which includes a minimum of 1 Tbyte of SATA storage.