What users are saying about self-healing storage
Since Xiotech introduced ISE at Storage Networking World in the spring of 2008, the new technology has rapidly come to account for more than 80 percent of the company's revenue. Scott Ladewig, manager of networking and operations for Washington University in St. Louis, traded in an older Xiotech model, the Magnitude 3000, for an Emprise 7000 last summer.
"In the past, it's not like we've spent hundreds of man-hours on drives, our whole SAN is 24 TB or so," he said. "But if a drive failed, we'd have to spend a Saturday night watching it rebuild, and drives are growing larger and larger, and taking longer periods of time to rebuild, when they're vulnerable to a double disk failure."
The five-year warranty offered by Xiotech included in the cost of the ISE system proved irresistible to Rick Young, network systems manager at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, who also replaced a Magnitude 3D 3000 with an Emprise 5000. "Right now we spend around $11,000 a year to maintain disk trays on the 3D," he said. "Multiply that by five years on the Emprise system, and it's no small amount of savings. We can put what we would've spent on maintenance towards our next refresh."
For Richard Alcala, chief engineer of New Hat LLC, a post-production firm in Santa Monica, Calif. more typical scale-out storage products with clustered file systems proved too cumbersome to manage in a performance-intensive environment. "The highest priority for us is the number of real-time streams" the system can feed to artists working on videos. With the older system, "we spent a lot of time doing maintenance, trying to heal the system and recover data," he said. "Once every three months we'd spend about four hours running diagnostics." Alcala replaced that system with Data Direct Networks' S2A 9900.
Some users in the enterprise data storage market have balked at the idea of highly automated systems, as they take away some of the control users have over all the elements of the system. But Atrato user Shawn Mills, president of Green House Data, a wind-powered green colocation and hosting facility in Wyoming, said he likes the attention he gets from a smaller company. "One of the primary reasons we chose Atrato turned into the primary reason we stayed with them," he said. "Access to Atrato's engineering team as one of the differentiators that lead us to them. After the sale, the access did not stop. They have been extremely responsive to our requests."
Xiotech has been "going gangbusters" in the enterprise with ISE, according to Data Mobility Group's Harris, but generally, Harris said he thinks the most advanced self-healing storage products will get the most traction in specialized vertical markets like media and entertainment and high-performance computing (HPC). "That said, how hard is it to power-cycle a hard drive?" he said. "That ought to be SOP for every disk array out there."
