In terms of the technology sector we always joke that when startups are 5 years old that sometimes makes them legacy! Meaning, 5 years is a long time in the eyes of a technologist – things change, tech changes, new hardware emerges. All of this drives change! Well if a 5 years makes a mature company than I’m not sure what to call X-IO Technologies. X-IO was founded nearly 25 years ago, in 1995 – taking them right off the scale in terms of aging for a tech company! Honestly, I’ve heard the name before (or saw the logo) but I’ve never really looked at what it is X-IO does – so today let’s take a look at the current X-IO offerings and solutions and what they have to bring to the table – and, if you are interested you can always learn more when they present at the upcoming Storage Field Day 13 event in Denver come June 14th – 16th. But for now, the tech…
[symple_box color=”yellow” fade_in=”false” float=”center” text_align=”left” width=””]Just a disclaimer of sorts – every article, comment, rant or mention of SFD13 that you find here has been completed on my own merits. My travel, flights, accommodations, meals, drinks, gum, etc are all paid for by Gestalt IT, however I’m not required or obliged to return the favor in anyway other than my presence 🙂 – Which still feels weird to say 🙂 Well, my presence and possible a little bit of Maple Syrup.[/symple_box]
What does X-IO bring?
From their website it appears that X-IO have a couple basic offerings, all hardware appliances, and all serving different points of interest in the storage market. Let’s try and figure out what each of them does..
Axellio Edge Computing
This appears to be an edge computing system marketed mainly companies needing performance for big data analytics as well as those looking for a platform to crunch data from IoT sensors. These converged storage and compute boxes are very dense in both CPU, Memory and Storage. Supporting up to 88 cores of CPU, 2TB of memory, and a maximum of 72, yes 72 2.5” NVMe SSD drives. Each appliance is basically broke down into two server modules for the compute and memory, as well as up to 6 FlashPacs (A FlashPac is essentially a module hosting 12 dual ported NVMe slots). As far as scale goes I don’t see much mention in terms of pooling appliances, so it appears that these are standalone boxes each serving a single purpose.
iglu Enterprise Storage Systems
Here it appears we have a storage array. The iglu storage system can be built using all flash, or a mixture of both flash and disk, or, just spinning disk itself. They appear to have multiple models supporting each disk configuration, with their all-flash version supporting over 600,000 IOPs. Controllers on the iglu system are distributed, meaning whenever we add more capacity we are also adding more controllers, thus increasing both space and performance with the same upgrade. As far as software goes we see all the familiar features such as snapshots, CDP, replication, stretched clustering features, integration with VMware, SQL, Oracle, etc.… One nice aspect to this is that all iglu systems, no matter the model, have access to all of the software features – there is no having to license individual aspects of the software.
I’m excited to see what X-IO has to say at SFD13 come this June. There was some mention of some unique way of handling drive failures, as well as offering a lengthy 5 year warranty on everything which may separate them from the storage vendor pack – but I’m hoping they have much more to talk about in regards to their storage offerings to give it that wow factor! As always you can find all my SFD13 related information here or follow the event page here to stay updated and catch the live stream!
