Xiotech Unveils Lower-Cost Fibre Channel Drives

Xiotech is adding a new wrinkle to the information lifecycle management (ILM) movement with a new category of Fibre Channel drives.

The company’s new tiered-storage Magnitude 3D offering features “Economy Enterprise” drives, which the company says is a new category that delivers the robustness of enterprise Fibre Channel for less. Xiotech is also making Serial ATA drives available within the Magnitude 3D, for a tiered storage offering that lets customers mix and match Enterprise and Economy Fibre Channel drives and SATA drives within the same storage cluster.

“We think it’s quite unique in the industry,” says Rob Peglar, Xiotech’s VP for Storage
Solutions.

With the new options, an entry-level 2TB Magnitude 3D with Fibre Channel drives starts at $39,500.

Enterprise drives run at 15,000 RPMs, while Economy ones run a third slower but have more capacity and the same reliability, Peglar says. The Economy Fibre Channel drives cost 30-40% less than the Enterprise FC drives, Peglar says, while SATA drives cost 65-70% less.

Xiotech, a Seagate spinoff and the largest privately-held storage company, says the new tiered storage offering lets organizations select storage options based on application performance and availability needs, the value of the data, and cost restraints. Customers can improve data readiness while lowering the cost of storage by migrating data from primary to secondary and tertiary storage based on factors such as cost, timeliness, business importance and compliance requirements.

For example, Enterprise Fibre Channel drives can be used for critical data that requires optimum performance and accessibility. Economy Enterprise drives can be used for secondary and staged data that still requires ensured availability and Fibre Channel duty cycles, while SATA capacity can be used for online archival and long-term compliance at lower cost and performance. All three drives can be used in the same cluster for seamless migration of data from one drive capacity to another as business requirements dictate.

“While SATA is an important component of any enterprise storage strategy, it may not be robust or reliable enough for critical data that is staging to secondary status yet still demands high availability,” states Xiotech CTO Karl Schubert. “By offering Fibre Channel, Economy Enterprise Fibre Channel and SATA, we are providing an additional tier of storage capacity that better fits the needs of customers’ data.”

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