Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2012/09/03/x_io_hyper_ise_7/

X-IO vows to end hot-swap disk pops with next-gen arrays

Chucks in some extra spindles too

By Chris Mellor

Posted in Storage, 3rd September 2012 08:42 GMT

X-IO has halved the number of SSDs in its Hyper ISE hybrid flash-disk arrays, increased overall performance by 50 per cent and cut prices by 20 per cent. It has also vowed to spare users the horror of popping a failed disk.

Hyper ISE is a sealed 3U enclosure that previously contained 30 x 2.5-inch 10,000rpm 900GB disk drives and 20 x 2.5-inch 200GB eMLC SSDs. The base capacity ratio is 18TB disk to 4TB of flash. The usable capacity after hot sparing but before RAID is 14.4TB. Flash is used as a tier and X-IO's CADP (Continuous Automatic Data Placement) algorithm is used to move hot data in real time off disk and onto flash, up-tiering, so it gets accessed faster.

X-IO also uses deep disk drive control software to recover a failed drive so that, for example, a drive with two platters and four heads, one of which fails, can still use the other three heads. The company claims no other disk array supplier can do this and it enables X-IO to pack its ISE enclosures with a small number of hot spares, so users never have to pop a failed disk; no hot-swapping by users here. Instead there is a five-year warranty against failure.

Hyper ISE 7 increases the number of spindles by 50 per cent to 30 and cuts the number of SSDs by 50 per cent to 10. It also varies the disk drive capacity to produce three models;

For the 14.4TB product the base capacity ratio is now 12TB of disk to 2TB of flash instead of 18:4. There is 1.6TB of flash after hot-sparing. Maximum IOPS have gone up from 200,000 for the first Hyper ISE to 300,000 for the new generation; boosting spindle numbers is a good thing. This has been augmented by optimising the CADP algorithms. All three new models have a 300,000 max IOPS rating, 60,000 max OLTP IOPS, and pump data to/from disk at 1.4GB/s as before.

Pricing has been set so that the new 14.4TB model costs 20 per cent less than the old one. Hyper ISE is a stripped down array, a lean and mean data access machine in the data management sense, with those functions often handled by controllers in other arrays now handled by system software up the stack in X-IO installations. The new models are available now. ®