Xiotech Brings Application Bandwidth Tuning to Midmarket; Releases VDisk Prioritization Capability, SMI-S Provider, New DataScale Software for Magnitude 3D 3000

Business Wire, Oct 4, 2005

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. -- Xiotech(R) Corporation today announced that it is bringing application-level bandwidth prioritization to the midtier enterprise with the new VDisk prioritization feature of its DataScale(TM) Platform Manager software. With VDisk prioritization, midtier enterprises can tune the quality of service received by different applications on-the-fly, either manually or automatically. Xiotech also released its Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) 1.1 provider.

These new features are available for use with Magnitude 3D(R) 3000 network storage solutions and are among a number of additions now available with DataScale Software Release 4.2.

"VDisk prioritization allows us to decide where we need to have constantly high performance, and where we can sacrifice it if the system is under extremely high load," said Randall Vogsland, systems engineer at Bowman and Brooke. "The ability to ensure that our transactional data is consistently handled promptly is very important to our business."

"Not all data is created equal," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "Even if there are multiple applications that have mission-critical information there are certain applications that require greater performance than others. It's not just about throwing more cache memory, or faster disks, or more powerful processors but also using intelligent software to leverage those hardware resources. Xiotech's VDisk prioritization provides that intelligence and enables customers to optimize their storage environments by applying prioritization on an application-by-application basis."

VDisk Prioritization

VDisk prioritization enables customers to set or change application bandwidth priority at any time. Unlike other systems, where all volumes compete equally for resources and read and write requests are serviced on a first-come, first-served basis, VDisk prioritization enables a flexible application environment in which business-critical application reads and writes receive service before other traffic.

With VDisk prioritization, midsized businesses can, for example, prioritize email traffic in the morning, when there is often a predictable surge. At the end of the business day, the balance can be shifted so that evening- and night-time applications, such as backup and CRM/ERP processing, can occur at optimal rates.

SMI-S 1.1

SMI-S providers enable network storage solutions, like the Magnitude 3D family, to be easily and seamlessly managed in a heterogeneous storage environment. With the release of its SMI-S 1.1 provider, Xiotech is reaffirming its commitment to making easy to use storage solutions for midtier enterprises. With SMI-S 1.1, midsized enterprises can easily take advantage of the Magnitude 3D family's ease of use, resilience and low total cost of ownership alongside legacy systems.

In addition to the release of VDisk prioritization and SMI-S 1.1, the latest release of Xiotech's DataScale software includes a number of other enhancements, including:

--Availability of DataScale SP for Microsoft Windows, a hardware provider for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service.

--224 drive VDisk support (up from 128)

About Xiotech

Xiotech(R) makes information storage easy to manage. Since 1996 more than 1,500 midsized enterprises have taken advantage of Xiotech's easy-to-use and highly resilient storage management solutions. The company's products include Magnitude 3D(R) 3000, Magnitude 3D 1000e, and TimeScale(TM) Rapid Restore. Current customers include Merrill Lynch, Bechtel, Lucent, Hibernia Bank, and St. Vincent Hospital. Xiotech also partners with industry leaders such as Brocade, Cisco, McDATA, Microsoft, and Novell. In 2004 Xiotech achieved record 25% revenue growth, and was named the fastest growing technology company in Minnesota by Deloitte & Touche in 2003. Xiotech is based in Eden Prairie, Minn. For more information, visit www.xiotech.com, email info@Xiotech.com, or call toll free 1.866.472.6764.

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