I’m often asked what kind of storage I’ve used in my own environment. Last year, Iimplemented a Xiotech ISE 19.2 in the data center of my now former employer. This Fiber Channel-based unit replaced our older iSCSI based system and has been incredible. Here are some of the reasons I went this direction:
- High IOPS. Xiotech has engineered their solution to maximize storage performance without sacrificing capacity.
- Reliability. If the claims are to be believed (and, I’ve done additional research, so I do believe the claims), the Xiotech solution is pretty darn reliable, even when using RAID 5 on the storage. Xiotech has additional protection mechanisms that happen under the hood.
- Ongoing performance. Xiotech claims that their box does not suffer performance degradation even as the unit gets filled to the brim with data. Customer references verified this claim.
- Up front with performance specs. Xiotech puts it all out there in a way that’s accessible. It’s ridiculously easy to learn, for example, that the company’s ISE 19.2 has 13.966TB of usable space and provides 8,003 IOPS when used with RAID 5. Of course, the published numbers would need to be verified in the real world, which they have been…
- 5-year hardware warranty. Nothing more to spend for 5 years unless I need more storage.
The environment was not large; at the time, it was running a little over 50 virtual machines on the Xiotech unit One of the nice things about having complete confidence in the storage and using a device that has pretty impressive performance figures.