Best of TechEd Finalist: X-IO Hyper ISE Reaches for New Heights

Here at Microsoft TechEd, I spent some time with X-IO’s Keith Hageman, Hollis Beall, and Blair Parkhill, who spoke about the great strides their already-powerful Hyper ISE has made since it took TechEd 2011 by storm by winning not only Breakthrough Product but also Attendees’ Pick.

Hyper ISE (formerly the Xiotech Hybrid ISE) is a performance-driven storage system that fuses together SSD and HDD into a single pool of capacity managed by Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP), the component that elevates this solution into the stratosphere, providing real-time provisioning of workloads to the right disk resources. It learns application behavior, quickly adapting to ensure that those apps achieve the highest levels of performance.

The performance numbers of the X-IO Hyper ISE continue to skyrocket, blowing away the competition in all kinds of real-world data-intensive applications and environments. The X-IO team shared the results of several benchmarks, including one in which X-IO Orchestrator essentially said, “The Hyper ISE is bored. Please give it something to do.” In another test (involving the telecom application and SQL Server 2012) intended to prove the product’s price/performance value, X-IO delivered eight times the volume of subscribers or customers at a third the storage cost, versus the expected results.

The X-IO team showing off the X-IO Hyper ISE

These test benchmarks illustrate that the Hyper ISE was built for not only extreme power but great value. This is a system that provides SSD performance at HDD prices, and it’s outperforming storage systems that are far more expensive.

The new X-IO Orchestrator software (upgraded from what were two separate pieces, ISE Manager and ISE Analyzer) gives Hyper ISE an extremely intelligent management interface.