In normal times, when there is no major technology disruption in the market, there are two categories of storage companies.
Most storage revenue goes to the big names everyone knows (EMC, NetApp, Etc.). These companies have comprehensive storage solutions and services to meet nearly any need. Their products are solid and meet most mainstream needs. They don’t innovate much and aren’t the most cost-effective, but they work.
A good deal of attention in the storage industry goes to the hot new companies, which are all about the latest technologies (e.g. SSD) or features. They usually don’t do the old things as well as the established companies. But by focusing on the hot new thing, they often do that one thing pretty well, and so appeal to the usually tiny part of the market that feels the corresponding pain. If they get market momentum, they are usually bought by an established vendor.
This is the way it works. The established companies take most of the revenue and do little innovation. There is always a flurry of new companies trying to innovate, sometimes getting traction, and getting absorbed by the established vendors.
Then there are technology disruptions. That’s when the rules change. Suddenly the comprehensive product lines of the established vendors don’t meet the needs of the emerging landscape very well (in spite of the furious efforts of their marketing groups to claim they do), and most of the new vendors don’t get the new situation and continue to do little but exploit new devices or add features onto the existing pile.
Today’s Technically Disrupted World
That’s the situation we’re in today, with the combined technology disruptions of data centers employing virtualization, moving to the Cloud, and attempting to exploit Big Data. In addition, there is a new storage technology, flash (SSD), which vendors are scrambling to exploit. The situation is confusing for buyers and chaotic for vendors, since most vendors try to act as though nothing fundamental has changed. But it has!
The Cloud is all about reliable, low-cost self-service, with tremendous automation and integration. Service, capacity and performance need to be available on-demand, with no human intervention. Everything needs to be able to grow and shrink as application needs change, with a sharp eye to capacity utilization, SLA's and costs, since it’s easier than ever to switch Cloud vendors when one stumbles or is simply no longer competitive.
Virtualization is a key part of achieving Cloud goals, and virtualization changes the rules of the systems game. Functions that were traditionally part of storage are now performed as an integral part of operating systems and/or virtualization software, to make them more agile. This also drives the movement to software-defined networking and storage.
Big Data is the same only more so, with its emphasis on linearly scalable arrays of compute nodes and storage nodes.
In response to this massive technology disruption, many companies realize that brand-name vendors no longer make much sense, and are using inexpensive JBOD’s for storage and depending on massive replication by the file system to provide reliability, typically making a minimum of 3 whole copies of the data, before backups, in order to assure availability. If the alternative is an old-technology NAS or SAN, this is a smart idea, which is why its use is growing so quickly.
X-IO
And then there is X-IO. While X-IO is a storage company, it’s different than all the others. It was built for a vision of computing that we now call “Cloud.”
When X-IO was started about 10 years ago as the Advanced Storage Architecture division of Seagate, its goal was to build highly compact, efficient and reliable storage building blocks using Seagate HDD’s. While the rest of the storage world was ignoring the details of the devices on which it was built, piling on features and management systems that have become obsolete in the Cloud world, the ASA group was inventing the technology of the storage “brick,” now amounting to over 50 patents and a great deal of field-hardened code that delivers more of what Cloud needs than any existing system, by far.
All storage vendors, whether established or emerging, use the same drives from the same couple of leading vendors, mostly Seagate or Western Digital (WD). All of them except X-IO package them in roughly the same way and throw some features on top of them to “differentiate” themselves from the other guys who use the same disks. It’s just as though all cars had one of two different kinds of nearly-identical engines in them – each of the car vendors would try to distract you from the engine, and try to get you to appreciate how wonderful their steering wheels or cup holders were. That’s even true of NAS and SAN, which seem so different, but really have the same engines (disks) in them – it’s like one has front-wheel drive and the other rear-wheel drive, but under most conditions, their speed, fuel efficiency, acceleration and service frequency are identical.
The only storage vendor that is different is X-IO, and X-IO’s difference just happens to be on all the dimensions that matter most for the new world of Cloud, virtualization and Big Data.
X-IO’s Difference
First of all, X-IO doesn’t build feature-encrusted storage, like a “trophy car.” It’s basic storage, a storage building block or brick, ideal for plugging into nodes in a Cloud server farm under virtualization control, or a Hadoop cluster.
Second, and most important, comes from its heritage as part of Seagate. While X-IO uses the same Seagate drives that other vendors use, all the other vendors just plug the drives in and proceed to concentrate on everything but the drive. X-IO’s technology, in sharp contrast, is all about making that drive perform at its very best. You wouldn’t think there would be much that could be done. But there is! X-IO reduces the error rate of the drives so much (more than 100X) that they can be sealed in containers, which makes them take much less space, consume less power and generate less heat than the same drives in any other system. Then the X-IO software actually gets more than twice the I/O’s per second (iops) from each drive than any other vendor.
Let’s think about a car rally. Most of the cars will vary greatly in size, shape, color and gizmo’s. The X-IO car will be the plain one. Imagine them in a distance race. Most of the cars will overheat or have to stop for gas pretty often. Only the X-IO car will never overheat and get vastly better mileage than the others. Many of the other cars will break down along the way. X-IO won’t. Here’s the amazing thing: the X-IO car will cross the finish line in half the time of its nearest competitor.
Now let’s think about sending an important package. Using normal cars, you’d better send 3 identical packages by different routes to make sure it gets there. With X-IO, you only need one car, and it will get there faster than any other car, using less fuel.
In the world of Cloud, this translates into not having to buy expensive SSD drives to get performance, though X-IO has them available if you need to go even faster than X-IO normally goes. It translates into not having to over-provision to get performance. It translates into not having to store 3 or more copies of your data to assure it’s still there tomorrow. It translates into buying a half or third of the number of racks (or rows!) you would normally have to buy in order to make a given amount of data available at a given performance level. It translates into dramatically lower operating costs for those racks, which at Cloud scale and Cloud competitive pricing can be the difference between growing profitably and losing to the competition.
No other storage vendor offers these benefits. No one but X-IO.
Conclusion
The “cloud” as we know it today didn’t exist when the ASA division of Seagate started inventing the deep technology that has now matured in X-IO. But its simple mantra of getting more value out of devices was a unique quest. No vendor has equaled it, and no one is even close. As new drives are released, the X-IO advantage will persist as a multiplier on whatever Seagate ships. All the other vendors will plug Seagate drives into their systems and try to distract you, drawing your attention to “anything but” the actual characteristics of the storage – its performance, space and power use, reliability. These thing are old news in the old world of storage, but they’re the only thing that matters in the new world of Cloud. Which is why there are all the storage vendors – and then there’s X-IO.
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