Xiotech's CorteX to change the storage world

Reliability

Sicola says ISE is much more reliable than the equivalent number of hard drives inside a traditional storage array: "We're a quarter of the code of an EVA or CLARiiON, and half of our code is error-recovery, self-healing stuff. One customer I know replaces 10,000 enterprise hard drives a year. It's crazy. With ISE rebuilds I can read most of the stuff on a failed drive. Other supplier's error recovery processes can't do that."

Xiotech has built around 3000 ISEs and shipped 2,500 of them. The company constantly monitors them, getting telemetry back, and this data is used to improve the reliability of ISE products. An ISE is self-healing. There is no need with it to do RAID builds anymore. Sicola asks us if we remember the Black Knight from Monty Python: "If anything in ISE fails, it's just a flesh wound."

Where did the name ISE come from? "The term was coined by Apple marketing in 2006 because they didn't like the brick word. Seagate contracted Apple."

SSD and ISE

What about solid state drives (SSD) and ISE? Sicola said: "We're going to be supporting SSD in the future. SLC (single-level cell) is the way to go. MLC (multi-level cell) will burn out soon. [With] bigger MLC parts the number of writes go down by half every time. Other technology will come up behind SSD and be more reliable.

"SSD has more ways to fail than hard disk drives. The makers don't know how to do error-recovery. The HDD guys have all the [error-recovery] patents. Seagate will end up just fine in the SSD business.

"Major customers are using SSDs to hold VM read images. When I do SSDs it will be all about I/O density."

International expansion

Sicola says: "The big deal right now is international expansion." Xiotech is looking to significantly expand its selling operations into new territories such as Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Sicola says ISE has a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional storage arrays and even newer ones such as the Compellent product. He cites a three-year TCO study which showed a Compellent installation costing $476,000 versus a ISE equivalent costing $53,000. He says a 3U ISE box can support 11,000 Ecxhange users. Figures like these are being used to recruit channel partners and help them sell into enterprises who can do more and buy less.

Xiotech is impatient. Its new management has made the ISE team the central focus. Storage veterans like Richie Lairy have been persuaded by the new team to come out of retirement and get to work in the ISE sandbox. Xiotech is the largest privately-owned storage company out there and you get the distinct feeling it wants to lose that tag by having an IPO as soon as it can. That's dependent on making ISE a success, and that means CorteX has to deliver the new storage world of dumb, high-performance and very reliable storage bricks doing their thing in virtualised storage infrastructures at the behest of hypervisors and other storage-using applications. ®