SCIENCE

Xiotech Corporation announced that Hybrid ISE has been named the "Breakthrough Product of the Year" and also earned the "Attendees' Pick" in the Best of Tech·Ed 2011 awards program.

Produced by Penton Media's Windows IT Pro,SQL Server Magazine, DevProConnections and SharePointPro, the Best of Tech·Ed 2011 awards recognize companies who offer innovative products for the industry. The judges reviewed 334 products and services submitted for the award and chose 48 finalists to be interviewed at the Microsoft Tech·Ed North America 2011 conference in Atlanta, Georgia on May 16. Winners were announced at an invitation-only evening reception at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, May 18.

Hybrid ISE was selected for these two awards because it has the best price/performance of any storage system in the industry. Microsoft tested Hybrid ISE achieving more than 60,000 IOPS in a single 3U system. Hybrid ISE intelligently integrates HDDs and SSDs delivering high performance for any application and workload.

According to Jason Bovberg, Senior Editor at Windows IT Pro, "One of the most important aspects of Hybrid ISE is its unique Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) technology, which automatically moves data to the right tier as needed. This breakthrough technology creates the optimal balance of performance, capacity and price. Everyone is talking about using SSDs within networked storage systems and for the most part these solutions have been disappointing. Hybrid ISE is the best implementation we have seen and we've looked at just about everything that is out there and that is why it won both of these Tech·Ed awards." In securing the Attendees' Pick distinction, Bovberg noted it "only confirmed our view that Hybrid ISE is one stylish, powerful, revolutionary piece of technology."

"We're really proud to receive these two prestigious awards in an impressive field of solutions. The technical rigor and evaluation that goes into the Tech·Ed awards is validation that we are executing on our vision," said Steve Sicola, CTO at Xiotech. "We've been successfully working with Microsoft in a number of ways, including the Partner Solutions Center. They have continued to test and affirm our value proposition even in the most demanding environments. The Xiotech team believes in what we've built and these awards are important because they are a real testament from an objective third-party expert that is respected in the market. I have a big smile on my face."

"We congratulate Microsoft partner Xiotech for achieving these two Best of Tech·Ed accolades," said David Hayes, Director, Microsoft Partner Solutions Center. "We are big proponents of Hybrid ISE and have plans to deploy the system as part of our core platform. We have performed rigorous testing and the Hybrid ISE performed better than any other storage system we've tested over the last 3 years. With the MPSC it is essential that we address the needs of our customers with design innovations that provide real and quantifiable value. We look forward to continuing our collaborative efforts with Xiotech to showcase the performance of Hybrid ISE in this dynamic IT data center environment."