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July 14, 2014 Issue

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ISE Storage Array Solution for Virtualized Environments

About X-IO Technologies

www.xiostorage.com

X-IO is a recognized innovator in the storage industry. The X-IO Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) systems are based on two decades of invention and investment by veteran storage industry experts, and deliver unmatched price/performance, reliability and scale for enterprise and cloud applications and infrastructure. The company’s plug-and-perform ISE storage arrays are customer-proven to accelerate transactional, reporting and business intelligence applications by a factor of 3X or more; drive extreme performance and scale for virtual desktop and virtualized server infrastructures; and with five- to seven-year duty cycles, a super-efficient energy and space profile, and the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). X-IO solutions have been recognized as SQL Server Magazine and Windows IT Pro’s 2011 Editors’ Best Gold Medal winners, the 2012 Best of TechEd “Hardware and Storage Product” and “Attendees’ Pick” Awards, and inclusion in CRN’s 2012 Data Center 100 List.

Brian Owen
CEO


Brian D. Owen brings to X-IO an extensive track record in growing the value of many companies through building distribution and value added reseller networks, as well as through strategic partnerships and alliances. Mr. Owen has previously held several highly successful CEO positions. As CEO of MapInfo (NASDAQ: MM) he oversaw an IPO that was 24 times oversubscribed, while his planned IPO at decalog NV triggered a sale to SunGuard (NYSE: SDS). He has also held senior executive positions within Computer Associates and Oracle. Most recently, Mr. Owen was a general partner with Masthead Venture Partners where he oversaw early-stage investments in emerging technology-based companies, many of which became category-defining leaders in high-growth markets. Mr. Owen is also a long time Executive Committee member with Boston College’s Technology Council and lecturer on entrepreneurship.

"Data storage is a really hot market right now. People—and therefore businesses—are accumulating ever-increasing quantities of data, from spreadsheets and documents to multimedia to unstructured data in databases. Storing all of this data is becoming a big priority and is at the heart of allowing businesses to make better decisions. X-IO has a very unique, next-generation solution that helps businesses solve the challenges associated with storing and managing massive quantities of data by delivering unprecedented performance and reliability."- Brian Owen


X-IO Technologies

9950 Federal Drive, Suite 100
Colorado Springs, CO 80921
719.388.5500

www.xiostorage.com


 

 

 

Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – July 14, 2014
 

CEOCFO: Mr. Owen, you have been involved in a number of very successful ventures. Why X-IO Technologies now?

Mr. Owen: Data storage is a really hot market right now. People—and therefore businesses—are accumulating ever-increasing quantities of data, from spreadsheets and documents to multimedia to unstructured data in databases. Storing all of this data is becoming a big priority and is at the heart of allowing businesses to make better decisions. X-IO has a very unique, next-generation solution that helps businesses solve the challenges associated with storing and managing massive quantities of data by delivering unprecedented performance and reliability.

 

CEOCFO: What have you figured out that others have not?

Mr. Owen: We figured out how to make a hybrid array that delivers consistently high performance without the need for any service intervention. A hybrid array is one in which traditional hard disks and flash drives work in a collaborative way to deliver unprecedented consistent performance and reliability. That reliability in particular comes from our heritage of being originally a division of Seagate and having access to their proprietary code and algorithms, so that if a drive were to fail within one of our enclosures, we are able to actually remanufacture the drive on the fly, without the user even being aware that we are doing it.

 

CEOCFO: Would you explain what you are actually selling and how it works?

Mr. Owen: It might be easier to start with what we don’t do. Our solutions cannot solve everything. There are many types of storage that are better suited for archival storage, for example, things that are stored and retrieved once in a blue moon. We are also not a Storage area network or SAN, which was a very hot thing ten to fifteen years ago because they come with monolithic systems that have a ton of features built into the storage array that do not fit the challenges facing businesses today.

 

What X-IO manufactures and sells is a storage solution that fits a modern data center that is highly virtualized. You have heard of the success of companies like VMware and Citrix, who are taking what were originally physical IT environments and using virtualization techniques are able to take a data center with two hundred servers down to twenty.

 

In doing so, they are moving from that old SAN world to a more modern world where many of the features that were expressly built for the SAN are being reinstated inside the highly virtualized environment of the data center. The more virtualized the customer is, the better the fit. If someone is actually going beyond doing server virtualization or if they are moving towards desktop virtualization world, we are even a better fit. That is because of the unique characteristics of the requirements from a storage center. A good example is a promotion that we are going to market with right now, named “VDI Emergency Response”. We see so many failed VDI implementations that are either inappropriately paired servers and storage or inappropriately sized, trying to meet a price target, that they go live on a Monday morning and the boot storm that occurs as all of the people come to work on Monday morning there is a colossal failure. We have been seeing the realization of sales cycles of less than a week and we are doing emergency responses to help fix the problem globally.

 

CEOCFO: How do you cut through the noise when you are reaching out to prospective clients? Everyone claims to have the latest and the greatest; how do you get your point across?

Mr. Owen: One, I think, is what market you are going after. We are not storage for everybody and we make a point to demonstrate where we offer value—and where other options may be a better fit. If your business is highly virtualized, it’s likely that we’re a good fit. That’s because many of the legacy providers are just not capable of meeting the demands of performance-hungry virtualized environments. Adding to that, we have thousands of very happy customers who we can count on as reference points; it’s always more powerful for our customers to explain why X-IO is great.

 

CEOCFO: Do you find that people are understanding more today that the old systems just will not do or is that still a big challenge?

Mr. Owen: Like many things in technology, there is a fundamental transition happening in the way businesses treat data. There are early adopters, the early mass market, the mass market and then finally, the laggards. Many organizations have highly-specialized engineers and technicians who are trained in storage management but are reluctant to move to a new platform for which they have little or no experience. It’s often perceived as a risk to try something new.

 

We look for businesses that are early adopters--those that are highly virtualized. They get it. They understand the value. They are reducing the number of servers by virtualization, saving their businesses money while offering end users an enhanced experience. Those people become the thought leaders and those are the people with whom we want to partner. For us, it’s about having appropriate conversations with the appropriate people at the time that they are looking at our solutions. That is how we cut through.

 

CEOCFO: Did you always understand that concept or was that something you learned from previous ventures?

Mr. Owen: It is probably thirty years of making many mistakes. It is the age old truism that we have to remind ourselves of every once in a while. Data storage is a huge market and we only need a small portion of it to be extremely successful. Therefore, we do not try to sell to everyone—and we cannot compete with the large legacy players in every market. There are opportunities for every storage vendor, from EMC and NetApp to other emerging vendors that represent more modern storage architectures. The evolving nature of data infrastructure is a rising tide that will lift many boats. We are just happy to be a part of that new wave of storage vendors that are being considered as people are deconstructing their SAN world and rebuilding a highly virtualized world.

 

CEOCFO: What do you worry about at night related to business?

Mr. Owen: I worry about everything—it’s a fast paced, fast moving industry. I worry about us getting recognized among the new wave of storage vendors, particularly because there is a great deal of money being spent on marketing “noise” creation. Because we don’t have the extremely deep pockets of some of the IPO-funded companies to compete from a marketing standpoint, we have to be really smart. We have to be laser-focused on where we can be successful and engage the right customers and prospects. When we find and engage them, we have relatively short sales cycles and we have highly successful implementation. Therefore, I worry about staying focused and cutting through the clutter and all of the noise out there.

 

CEOCFO: Why should people pay attention to X-IO Technologies?

Mr. Owen: They should pay attention to X-IO Technologies because for the right market, X-IO is extremely important and relevant to customers or prospects that utilize highly virtualized environments and are moving towards virtual desktop implementations. That is because we deliver unprecedented price performance, overall performance and reliability. For example, right when you purchase our product, we give you a five year warranty on the product. We’ve now been selling the product for over 5 years and have many customers who’ve never needed to see an engineer at any point, something that’s completely unique to X-IO. Therefore, we have dramatically reduced the cost of maintaining those systems while delivering unprecedented performance for highly virtualized environments. For other parts of the world where energy and space really becomes the issue, our data center footprint and energy consumption is a fraction of other vendors’. For places like India and China, where energy and its availability and cost, when you can get it, is very high, those are other factors and considerations.

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