Xiotech, a company that provides high-performance storage blades based on its patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, announced it will begin shipping its upcoming Continuous Availability offering in the third quarter — with early access for customers beginning in April.
The solution, which will work across a metro area, aims to provide complete business continuity capabilities, without the cost and hassles of more expensive solutions high-availability systems.
“ISE was designed to be storage that is invisible and just works,” Steve Sicola, Xiotech’s CTO, said in a statement.
“With ISE Continuous Availability we are extending the true active-active nature of an ISE storage blade across an entire ISE infrastructure — that reaches across the datacenter, the campus, or even a metro area without added storage software licensing costs, solution complexity or support requirements” he added.
Xiotech’s ISE technology uses disks installed inside sealed containers in an integrated environment of linearly scalable 3U storage blades in sizes ranging from 4.8 TB to 19.2 TB. A single ISE blade can handle more than 27,000 Microsoft Exchange users, more than 1,000 virtual desktops, or 25,000 MP3 streams simultaneously, the company said.
“ISE Continuous Availability brings the highest level of storage availability for all mission-critical applications, enabling full read and write access to the data regardless of which of the two active storage blades are accessed,” the company said.
In addition, ISE Continuous Availability requires minimal configuration or maintenance, and it lets both virtual and physical servers to remain connected to their data, regardless of network failures, storage volume failures or other disruptive events, Xiotech said.
Due to its design, in the event of a failover, any ISE blade on the network can take on mirroring functions and, ror maximum data availability, the system uses fibre channel communications between blades.
