Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo

Xiotech Corporation, a provider of intelligent application-oriented storage solutions, on Thursday announced a new Virtualization Performance Pack that expands on the company's industry-leading performance, scalability and simplicity in virtual environments.

Xiotech's new capabilities further unlock the value of its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology for customers across hypervisors, including VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Hyper-V, and remove the bottlenecks that plague virtualization deployments. The new components within the pack include broader support within ICON Manager's Virtual View, storage adapters for Citrix XenServer and VMware, and best-practice tools. A recent survey of Xiotech customers by TechValidate found that more than a third of customers realized 20 to 30 percent increases in utilization and operational savings of as much as 50 percent with Xiotech Virtual View.

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Customers: "Tech the Way it Should Be..."
Xiotech customers such as Campbell Union High School District -- a seven-school network located in the heart of Silicon Valley -- are moving broadly to a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) to increase performance for distance learning and student communications, while also reining in costs and getting off of the "tech purchasing treadmill." The results are receiving high grades from teachers and IT.

The District has set a goal of virtualizing 100 percent of its 2,500 desktops within three years, and the applications range from student access to teachers and learning materials outside of school hours to fully virtual classroom environments. The District also needed to segment its storage to dedicate resources to performance-based activities for live desktops and resources to house and serve a host of rich media content.

After a rigorous evaluation of technology options to support this effort, the District chose Xiotech's ISE technology. "To achieve our goals, we needed dynamic storage technology that allowed us to scale rapidly, without repeatedly 're-buying' the management infrastructure," said Charles Kanavel, technology director of Campbell Union High School District. "Xiotech's technology won on performance and simplicity. It's great technology and the way tech should be -- you don't know it's there. In fact, the performance and accessibility of rich media and learning tools has directly resulted in higher grades for the students taking advantage of them."

Virtualization Performance Pack: Simply Virtual
As virtualization deployments extend past servers and down to the desktop -- for the purposes of cost and flexibility -- inefficiencies within the way legacy storage is provisioned and managed have created severe bottlenecks in performance and complexity. High software/infrastructure overhead, management sprawl and limited scalability are just some of the issues that drain value from virtualized environments.

"We've only scratched the surface of value to be derived from virtualization," said Arun Taneja, consulting analyst and founder of Taneja Group. "Unfortunately, storage performance is too often the limiting factor as businesses struggle to virtualize their mission-critical applications. The time has come for storage to not only participate in the virtualization journey, but also to unlock its true potential."

Comprising the broadest virtual machine support in the industry, Xiotech's ISE technology offers the ideal storage building block for virtualized environments with industry-leading performance, no software overhead, simplified provisioning/management, 100 percent utilization and unmatched reliability -- backed by the industry's only five-year warranty.

With the launch of the Virtualization Performance Pack, Xiotech has added even more power to customers' virtualization arsenal and reduced what before required more than a dozen steps and three interfaces, to now only three steps and one interface. The components that make this possible include:

• ICON Manager's Virtual View - added support for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V to existing VMware support, enabling autoprovisioning and reporting of storage resources from ISE directly to any virtual environment.
• StorageLink Adapter for Citrix XenServer - tighter integration with the XenServer environment and the ability for direct management of ISE from Citrix.
• VMware vCenter Storage Replication Adapter - a plug-in for direct recovery of data from ISE within VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™.