Welcome to the XtremIO blog. This is the place to read about our company and products, but also to learn about flash storage and how it is applied to improve performance, ease-of-use, and efficiency for several different application environments including databases, ERP applications, analytics, and virtualization.
Let’s begin with an anecdote about XtremIO. A good place to start is with the pronunciation of our company name. The correct way to say it is, “Extreme Eye Oh”. Some common incorrect pronunciations are “extreme-ee-oh” and “ex-tremm-ee-oh”. We’ll still answer to these, but it’s best to set the record straight. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about why we chose this somewhat hard-to-pronounce name. It is common knowledge that server and networking technologies have followed Moore’s Law for many years while storage performance has badly lagged due to the limitations imposed by hard disk drives. This has created an I/O (input/output) bottleneck. We have the capability to create and process vast amounts of information, but we lack the ability to rapidly move it on and off of persistent storage. Meanwhile, the cost and complexity involved in trying to close this storage performance gap has become acute. What’s needed is a new approach to storage – one that is extremely ease-to-use, extremely efficient in the data center (in terms of space, power, and cooling requirements), extremely scalable so it can keep pace with Moore’s Law, and deliver extreme utilization rates (usable capacity, consistent performance). In a nutshell, we need extreme I/O capability to match our extremely powerful servers, extremely fast networks, and extremely efficient virtualized data centers. Thus, XtremIO was coined.
XtremIO was founded in 2009 by a very experienced team of engineers with a vision of leveraging flash technology to provide a step function in every aspect of storage systems. Flash is gaining wide acceptance in the data center today because of its performance potential, and as you’ll see, XtremIO takes the performance of flash to new heights. Performance is an important piece of our story, but it is only the beginning. Our team realized that by engineering a storage system around random access media such as flash (rather than sequential media like disk) incredible gains in efficiency, functionality, and ease-of-use could also be realized. So XtremIO storage is amazingly fast and scalable, but it is also the easiest storage to use that you’ll likely ever encounter and incredibly efficient in every dimension. This is important, because one of our goals is to make enterprise-grade flash storage arrays accessible to a broad market. All the technology in the world doesn’t help if the resulting product is priced out of reach of existing storage budgets. So one area where we are not “extreme” is in our cost of ownership. In fact, in many environments XtremIO storage will cost less than the disk storage it is replacing.
Thank you for following us. We are very excited about what we’re building and eager to share more details in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
