Customer Stories

posted on 12 June 2008 07:40

Xiotech has announced its first customer for its long-life (5-year warranty), sealed disk canister Emprise storage array product introduced in April, Argus Information & Advisory Services .

Argus, based in White Plains, N.Y., gathers information from a multitude of sources and provides products and services, such as customized benchmark reports, to help financial institutions make marketing and risk management decisions. To do so, Argus holds a number of reports and databases in a Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse, and needs to update and manipulate large amounts of granular information from many disparate sources on an ongoing basis. The ability to update and process data fast and provide it to clients gives Argus its competitive advantage.

When Argus' lease was up for its previous storage system earlier this year, it determined it was time for a higher performing and more scalable solution.

Nick Daffan, a principal at Argus Information & Advisory Services, said: “While our previous storage system had served us fine over the past three years, our CPU utilization was averaging less than 20 percent and we were completely bottlenecked on data storage throughput. We needed to plan for our expected growth and determined our business required a system that could support at least 1 gigabyte per second and scale horizontally without impacting throughput.”

Xiotech provided three Emprise 5000 systems for the company to test.

Daffan said: “Each Emprise system delivered between 600 and 800 megabytes per second of throughput, and as we added Emprise units they scaled linearly. With just two systems, our performance was between 1,200 and 1,500 megabytes per second, exceeding Xiotech’s promise and our minimum requirements. This gave us a lot of confidence in Xiotech and the Emprise system.”

“Storage performance was our bottleneck and Xiotech was able to meet our requirements with significantly less hardware than other vendor options. As a result, our tests showed that the Emprise 5000 system’s power requirement was half of other vendor alternatives.”

Argus bought 16 Emprise 5000s for its data warehouse, choosing them because of factors such as data throughput, scalability, and energy consumption. It found Xiotech was able to exceed its required 1GB/sec throughput with just two Emprise units, and could also cope with the expected 40TB storage requirement now to in excess of 200TB in a few years time. The Emprise needed half the power requirements of other storage systems with similar capacity and performance.

Argus expects to buy another 32 Emprise products by the end of 2009.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}