The Xiotech Hybrid ISE, as the name implies, uses a combination of solid state drive technology and hard drive technology in their data packs. A Xiotech data pack is essentially a sealed storage unit that goes into a Xiotech system. Traditionally that pack has held a high density of drives. The sealing of the unit provides for extremely high reliability and performance capabilities. The hard drives are 900GB in size and the SSDs are 100GB in size. The total capacity per data pack is 7.2TB per unit and two data packs can be installed in a system. While environments that will take advantage of this type of performance will likely mirror the two data packs the Hybrid ISE supports all the normal RAID levels.

What makes the Hybrid ISE is how deep of an understanding Xiotech has of the data that is being written to their system. Xiotech has always had a very granular control and understanding of how data is being read and written to their device. With the Hybrid ISE they tap into this capability and deliver a process called Continuous Adaptive  Data Placement. This means they monitor I/O intensity to promote and demote data as it is being read and written to the device. Being able to integrate HDD and SDD so tightly should allow these systems to be able to deliver SSD performance at a little more than HDD pricing.

Storage Swiss Take

When legacy vendors come out with SSD based system it typically means they insert SSD drives into their existing units without giving much thought to the way SSD works. They end up with faster (and much more expensive) shelves but don’t really leverage what solid state technology could potentially bring to the customer. We have said all along that SSD requires a new generation of storage products designed with solid state in mind. Hybrid ISE is an example of a vendor that gets it. This is a new generation of product that while still compatible with their current offering sets a new standard in performance. It should be able to compete directly with niche SSD products yet fulfill the key enterprise requirements of availability and share-ability.

There is a constant question about when the enterprise is going to more broadly adopt solid state disk and while niche adoption is underway in the enterprise more broad adoption is going to require enterprise grade services and functionality. The upcoming release of the Xiotech Hybrid ISE is a serious attempt at addressing the shortcomings of solid state to make it technology enterprise ready.