SAN FRANCISCO 2010 EVENT CALENDAR

courtesy of Oggi Kashi @ Paragon Real Estate

Oggi Kashi,
Broker Associate
DRE No. 1844627
Paragon Real Estate Group
1160 Battery Street, San Francisco, CA 94111

415 . 690 . 3792 . Mobile
415 . 874 . 5020 . Direct

XIOTECH BLOG: #7 with upside

ripped off from Storage Monkey:

Rank	Company	Blog	Votes	Employee #*	%
1	Zetta	Zetta blog	39	25	156.00%
2	Nirvanix	Stephen Foskett	55	38	144.74%
3	Cleversafe	Cleversafe blog	28	35	80.00%
4	Ocarina Networks	Carter George & Sunshine Mugrabi	20	50	40.00%
5	Sepaton	Jay Livens	19	87	21.84%
6	3Par	Mark Farley	66	614	10.75%
7	Xiotech	Xiotech blog	24	300	8.00%
8	Pillar	Mike Workman	17	500	3.40%
9	FalconStor	Chris Poelker	13	505	2.57%
10	HDS	Hu Yoshida	67	2700	2.48%

 

see the blog here:  http://blog.xiotech.com/blog/

Xiotech reloads Matrix

ISEbergs warning

By Chris Mellor • In Storage • At 12:47 GMT 29th January 2010

Matrix
It hopes that Matrix will provide that push. The company is talking to various non-IT stack-aligned vendors about participating in Matrix. McDonald isn’t identifying any, but we might imagine Ocarina (dedupe) and Caringo (CAS) are the kinds of vendors he has in mind. The Matrix controller will sit outside the Matrix storage resource containers and provision/de-provision them as needed by the storage-controlling app in the servers.

It doesn’t exist yet and will need software and interfaces. We might hear formally about Matrix, see a v1.0 release of some sort, by the mid-year point. The Cortex API, used by storage system resource functions to talk direct to ISE as a control path, with Matrix being a data path, will have a v1.0 announcement this quarter.

Matrix is a very channel-friendly idea, “Isn’t it!” says McDonald. On the OEM channel front Xiotech is still immensely keen to recruit OEMs to take its ISE boxes. McDonald says it’s energetically talking to prospective OEMs, again not identifying any.

ISE Roadmap
The ISE boxes themselves have their own roadmap but flash doesn’t figure on it, yet. There is still no justification, in McDonald’s view, for adding flash. It’s just too expensive and has hideous read:write assymetry as well as endurance problems. When it gets cheap enough and these issues can be overcome, then we might see a flash ISE.

What’s likely to come first is an ISE front-end interface change. Currently an ISE box has two 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel ports. Ethernet is very likely to be added in its 10GBit form, but Xiotech is undecided about whether to offer iSCSI or FCoE layered on top of it.

The drives inside ISE may become 6Gbit/s SAS ones and the drive-ISE controller fabric may change from 4Gbit/s FC to a SAS one as well.

The message is that ISE boxes can be aggregated together in an ISEberg or JBOI (just a bunch of ISEs) and controlled by mid-tier storage resource applications like dedupe, CAS, replication, whatever, and/or by direct storage-controlling server apps like VMware, Exchange 2010 and Oracle. Bypass expensive and complex storage arrays, with fat controllers and high-maintenance disk drives that lose performance as they fill, by using collections of superdisks, ISE boxes, under the direct control of server apps. That’s the Xiotech mesage in a nutshell. ®

(repost from The Register)

Violin Memory Inc. Raises $16.6M of $26.9M Offering

http://philly.citybizlist.com/yourcitybiznews/detail.aspx?id=65722

Xiotech Fuels the “Apple Effect” in New Consumer Media Development, Delivery and Consumption Models

 

Single Xiotech ISE Unit Can Simultaneously Power 750 DVD Quality Video Streams, 25,000 mp3s or 4 Studio-class Movie Editing Projects

BD EVENT, PALO ALTO, CALIF. – January 27, 2010 – In the wake of Apple’s latest computing revolution, Xiotech Corporation, a leader in intelligent application-oriented storage solutions, today announced that its patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE™) technology has unlocked significant new capabilities in video and audio editing and production, in support of high-compute environments within Macintosh computers from Apple Computer, Inc.
 
Users are now able to do the following from a single ISE unit:

• Support the equivalent of operating every movie theater screen in the state of Colorado at the same time from a single storage element.  ISE can drive 750 simultaneous DVD-quality video-on-demand streams without losing a single frame, according to SPC-2 testing [1].  
• Play up to 25,000 mp3 files at the same time.
• Run four professional video editing projects simultaneously from the same console with no frame drops.
• Move a Mac operating system to ISE and boot from it, which provides a substantial boost in platform performance and reliability.  

Regardless of application, ISE technology enables maximum performance, linear scalability and dynamic flexibility.  ISE technology’s consistent, sustained performance allows significant load levels to run smoothly whereas other storage back-ends or processors would bog down. In all of the above situations, ISE performed at unprecedented levels without dropping a single frame or piece of audio.  ISE technology also features self-healing characteristics, allowing drives to essentially heal themselves in place and significantly minimize the number of service events in an environment. All ISE platforms are supported by the industry’s only five-year hardware warranty.
 
“The newly announced Apple iPad is just the latest example of the dramatic changes taking place in the production of consumer media,” said Alan Atkinson, president and CEO of Xiotech.  “These ISE-driven video and audio production capabilities truly unlock the potential of devices like the iPad. These same characteristics also make ISE technology the ideal storage play in solving any number of pain points in today’s data centers, from relieving performance bottlenecks and lowering high total cost of ownership to implementing newer initiatives such as virtualization and cloud.”

Explosive data growth has outstripped the legacy storage infrastructure, requiring costly overprovisioning of resources to overcome a significant performance bottleneck. Offering a fresh approach to this well-entrenched business reality, ISE technology delivers the industry’s highest-performing and most reliable application-oriented data storage. ISE units enable 100 percent usable storage capacity, while maintaining optimal performance as drives approach full utilization. Notably, due to efficiencies inherent in ISE technology, Xiotech allows organizations to scale their storage infrastructures with unprecedented flexibility and cost effectiveness.

reposted from xiotech

We seek the alpha-gearhead, the mathlete, the future CEO…

slogan from Kettering U (fomerly GM Institute) — are you Kettering material?? take the quiz!

http://admissions.kettering.edu/quiz/

FISHWORKS: Screaming in the Data Center

Xiotech’s ISE segregates mounted disk drives back-to-back on a center-plane (as opposed to a backplane).  The drives that are back to each other spin in opposite directions — this counters vibration.  Additonally, the center-plane acts a heatsink.  Reducing drive vibration and heat are two of the integral factors.

Notice also that there is no backplane anywhere inside the 3u enclosure — this means air flows fully through the device which means much more cooling with less energy expended.

Our friends at SUN FISHWORKS have studied this and produced a video to demonstrate how vibration can affect drive performance: 

You can read all about it here:  http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

Performance Anxiety: Notes from Rob Peglar

Performance (Still) Matters

Posted by Rob Peglar

At the start of each year, many companies – Xiotech included – have national meetings with their public-facing employees.  These meetings are colloquially referred to as ‘kickoff’ events, which implies something new, a fresh start, the beginning of another game.  While there is certainly a lot of truth in that, kickoff is also a good time to revisit topics which may have faded from memory but are in truth even more relevant today.  One such topic is storage performance.

The last decade – football game, if you like – was dominated by one ‘team’, that being capacity.  Growth of capacity, management of that growing capacity, backup of that capacity, replication and protection of that capacity, all things capacity.  Enterprises couldn’t get enough storage, quickly enough, to meet their data growth needs.  They were constantly running out of storage.  So, they grew and grew and grew, and spent and spent and spent.  Towards the end of the decade, predictably enough, some enterprises turned their focus towards data reduction after many years of data growth.

The other team – performance – took many hits over the years as capacity dominated.  Performance made a few yards every now and then, but mostly, had to punt, as capacity won the day-to-day battle.  However, in this decade, performance has the ball and is driving, as capacity is reduced.  I personally believe performance – once the dominant criteria for storage, when datasets were small – is making a big comeback.

Performance learned many lessons over the last decade.  Today, performance is not merely about IOPS, throughput or response time – the traditional three aspects.  It’s about ratios: the three aspects of performance per unit of input.  Now, what’s “input”, you say?  To an enterprise, in particular IT, inputs are simple:  money, time, space, power, cooling, and humans (which require money), bringing us full circle.

So, it’s not about IOPS, it’s about IOPS/$, IOPS/watt, (IOPS * TB)/watt, and other ratios.  Measuring storage performance using ratios turns out to be the most useful technique for enterprises to evaluate their storage; after all, CFOs measure business performance using ratios.  I believe CIOs should measure IT performance in general and storage performance in particular using ratios.  On the compute side, we often refer to servers not by how many virtual machines they can merely hold, but how many they can run efficiently and meet a given SLA.  There is a direct business translation between that and what a cloud compute provider would measure, for example.  The same should be true for storage.

Storage devices (including arrays) perform only three essential functions; they store data, move data, and protect data.  Inherent in all these essential functions is efficiency.  We now know how to store efficiently, as seen by the increasing use of data reduction techniques.  Protecting data efficiently is also a well-understood realm, both in terms of data at rest (such as the new RAGS method) and data in flight (using a variety of new and efficient encryption methods).  But what of moving data?  The ball is now in the red zone – can we move the ball (data) into the end zone, or will we be distracted by the cute cheerleader on the sideline (features that are licensed by the TB) who looks nice but doesn’t play?

Moving data to applications is the entire game now.  The more efficiently data is moved, the more efficiently enterprises can run their workloads.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and his name is performance.  But not the old performance, i.e. ‘my array gets more IOPS than your array’ – but the new performance, measured in ratios.  It’s quite straightforward.  Place the attributes where more is better, such as IOPS, GB/sec (yes, I said GB, not MB; MB is old-school), petabytes (yes, I said petabytes; the 2010 decade is the decade of the petabyte in the enterprise) and length of warranty (e.g. at least 5 years) in the numerator, and place attributes where less is better, such as $, rack U, floor tiles, watts, BTUs, and human costs in the denominator.  For example, IOPS* TB / $.  This particular metric measures cost efficiency over a given surface with a given workload.

Yes, it’s a new year, and we have a new kickoff.  Performance has the ball, and is driving.  Pay attention to it – because like most things in IT, it’s an old idea, an old notion, an old concept made new again.  Performance still matters, because time is still money, and efficiency is the way to save time.  After all, there’s only 24 hours in a day, and that is the inexorable limit we all battle.

Peglar Bio

Rob Peglar is Treasurer of SNIA and VP Technology of Xiotech.  He  is a 32-year storage industry veteran, published author and sought-after speaker and panelist at leading storage and networking-related seminars and conferences worldwide. At Xiotech he helps shape strategic vision and emerging technologies, defines future offering portfolios, plays a key role in product planning and serves as an industry/customer liaison. He has served as chair of the SNIA Tutorials, on the boards of the Green Storage Initiative and the Solid State Storage Initiative and as secretary/treasurer of the Blade Systems Alliance. He has won numerous awards for his efforts and expertise, including being one of 30 senior executives worldwide selected for the Network Products Guide 2008 MVP Award.

OAK INVESTMENT PARTNERS: Why Xiotech?

Xiotech Corporation delivers the highest storage value available today based on its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE™) technology. With ISE, Xiotech® products deliver 100 percent usable storage capacity with no drop in performance. Drives are fully utilized, provide more performance with less hardware because of their efficiency and enable organizations to scale their storage infrastructures up and out with unmatched flexibility. Additionally, Xiotech significantly reduces storage operation and management costs with the patented self-healing technology of ISE and the industry’s only five-year hardware warranty. Also, the ICON Manager user interface integrates and automates storage operations across the array, server and virtual machine layers. With these technologies, Xiotech stands alone in its ability to lower an organization’s total cost of ownership for storage.

“I can honestly tell you that the buzz factor was impressive”

…that’s Steve Duplessie writing in his blog “THE BIGGER TRUTH”  talking about the recently-concluded XIOTECH national sales meeting…thanks Steve!