NEWS & NOTES FROM THE THOUGHT LEADERS OF DATA STORAGE

Last night, the unofficial Xiotech 2010 “Run Better” Summer Tour landed in Colorado Springs, and Xiotech president and CEO Alan Atkinson threw out the first pitch before the Fresno Grizzlies and Colorado Springs Sky Sox took the field for their Pacific Coast League baseball game.  A great time was had by all!

Next up: VMworld in San Francisco next week, and the VMworld 5K Fun Run on Sunday!  Check back next week for more on those events.

Yes, I admit, it’s not a word. Virtuality, that is. I can hear my fellow SNIA Board member, SW, scream from 1,500 miles away – “that’s not a word!” But in thinking about all things virtual, it came to mind. There is reality, and then there is virtuality.

I bet you know where I’m going with this post – to the upcoming VMworld show, and all it entails. Xiotech will have a huge presence there, of course. Personally, I am not attending – the better to be with customers who are exercising their virtuality in reality – but I’m sure it will be quite good.

It seems there is nothing that is not past being virtualized these days. We’ve had virtual memory for quite literally four decades, and virtual machines (courtesy of mainframers long past). We have virtual private networks, virtual storage area networks, virtual addressing, and oodles (a technical term) of virtual channels, tunnels, paths and such. Virtual servers (which are SO 2009) and virtual desktops (which are actually so 1988, but made new again!) Even down at the storage layer we have virtual disk, virtual tape (which actually preceded virtual disk), virtual ports, virtual links, virtual controllers, you name it. We have, without doubt, massive virtuality.

There is one thing, however, that is very real, and that is the need to get data very quickly from external sources to the home of compute, the CPU – the better to run our virtual servers and from there, our virtual desktops. As we increase virtuality, we also must increase the attention paid to the enormity of the data required and its care, feeding and most of all, efficient transport. Without efficient transport, virtuality begins to degrade. Yes, the bits are still real – perhaps the only thing that is so these days.

Getting those real bits to the CPU efficiently and quickly demands no less than a very masterful approach, one that (dare I say it) requires a virtuoso. One that succeeds in pushing the omnipresent bottleneck back ‘up’ towards the CPU, RAM and the plethora of virtuality going on up there. At Xiotech, we structure all our R&D towards that end – squeezing the ‘balloon’ back up towards the top – and as such have designed the ISE to be the highest performing rotating storage blade/disk array available, bar none. U for U, $ for $, TB for TB. Even if we left out all the patent work surrounding reliability, managing disc drives, and all the ISE is rightfully famous for, the ISE would be a worthy addition to all the virtuality by its performance alone. You see, one has to solve two problems – BOTH capacity and performance. Virtuality demands both. Many approaches solve one, but not the other. ISE solves both, simply and elegantly.

As such, stay tuned for much, much more on this subject – I/O performance and what it means to virtual environments – as well as performance per unit, where the unit may be capacity, dollars, watts, rack U, years of time, and combinations thereof.

For it turns out that where virtuality meets reality is in these units – all the very real units that enable all our virtuality. Pay attention to them, keep track of them, treat them as the precious real resources they are. If you can get the real units to behave together, conducted by a virtuoso, virtuality will be sweet music indeed. Here’s to virtuality!

Oh, and one last thing, with apologies to Shirley Ellis and Lincoln Chase -
“Katana Katana bo bana, banana fana fo fana, fee fi mo mana, Katana!”

It’s hard to believe that VMworld 2010 will begin in just two weeks!  We’re very excited for the show this year – here is some of what we are planning at/around the show:

• Steve Sicola Speech: “VDI Unleashed” – Steve, our CTO, is one of the biggest rockstars in storage today and the leader of the team that conceived and built our game-changing ISE technology.  He’ll deliver a breakout session on Tuesday, Aug. 31 at 5 p.m. (PT) talking about the promise that VDI holds in today’s datacenters, how storage is in many ways the key item holding back mass adoption of VDI and best practices for deploying and integrating storage for VDI.
• Chad Bittner Speech – Chad is one of our top technical minds, especially in the areas of virtualization and VDI.  He will lead a session on Wednesday, Sept. 1 at 11 a.m. (PT) digging into the nitty gritty of VDI and how it can benefit organizations.
• Our booth, #631, will be busy with demos, great giveaways (including iPads), information and lots of Xiotech staff to help you with your needs.
• Be sure to keep watching @Xiotech on Twitter for our latest news and information at the show, including booth activities and giveaways.

We’ll continue to update this with any new information in the next couple of weeks.  In the meantime, feel free to visit our Xiotech home page and our VDI page for more information on how we’re making organizations “Run Better.”

Hope to see you there!

This Wednesday evening, on a nice night in downtown Minneapolis, Team Xiotech broke out its running shoes and participated in the Aquatennial Torchlight 5K race.  We had a great time “running better” – just like our storage!

Here are some of our photos from the event:

If we missed you this time, we hope to see you there next year!

Many of you who follow this blog know that I enjoy movies, and often use them in my blogging. Today is no exception – I just finished watching “2010″ (for what must be the zillionth time, along with the original “2001″) 2010 is not only an interesting movie to see this year – after all, it _is_ 2010 – but is interesting because of a terrific line that is uttered twice in the movie. The first time is when Dave Bowman appears on television, to his wife – who is scared senseless at first, on seeing him but soon realizes that it is him – and the second time when Bowman appears back in Discovery, replete in spacesuit, to an incredulous Heywood Floyd. The line is just classic: “Something’s going to happen…something wonderful.”

By the time you read this, it may be July 20th, 2010 (or even beyond that). But tonight, July 19th, I can tell you that at Xiotech, something’s going to happen…something wonderful. What is it? Well, there has been a little buzz about, but tomorrow you’ll understand much more clearly than before – just as Heywood Floyd did. Now, granted, we aren’t about to create a new sun or spawn an entirely new moon with life, but in terms of storage and its role in enterprise virtualization (especially VDI), cloud and performance-starved applications, it is darn near cosmic. For the storage industry, that is…

It’s wonderful for enterprise users. Enterprise users have long been in a holding pattern – seeing evolutionary gains, incremental improvements, but nothing revolutionary or monumental, truth be told. Two years ago, ISE began to change that holding pattern, slowly but surely. Now, much as the monolith in 2010 finally absorbed an entire moon, creating a very big shock wave through the solar system, ISE will explode outwards in the form of new offerings, new capabilities, new methods, new ways to take advantage of the value. Oh, and yes, there will be metrics…because enterprises run on metrics, efficiencies and the ability to measure their own performance in their chosen lines of business. And yes, we also pay attention to the value of working with enterprises at the highest levels possible, looking at broad business issues, helping enterprises solve real business problems, unlike some who would try to convince readers that only “they” know how to interact with the C-level of enterprises and those who do pay attention to technical detail are mere bit-twiddlers.

So, tomorrow, something’s going to happen…something wonderful. If you know the movie, you know the end, and it’s different – life will never be the same – but very happy. I for one look forward to a different world where new ideas and new ways of working are in place – VDI as a norm, cloud as a stalwart (think of all the wonderful RESTful interaction) and applications that do not starve for performance but can be scaled at will. Now, that’s a great idea…in 2010.