Tommy Trogden

In my role here at Xiotech I get to spend a lot of time with prospects as well as customers. It's probably why I love my job so much. My wife seems to think it has more to do with my A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder) and the ability to change topics and discussions on a daily basis then it does anything else. She's probably right; at least she likes to point out just how right she typically is!! But that's probably a separate blog posting So back to my role and the blog topic at hand. Have you heard of the phrase "Performance Starved Applications" or PSA? Hopefully this term is not new to you. PSAs are simply applications that are not performing correctly due in large part to two things. First, the customer purchased a solution that the vendor failed to size correctly; or if it was sized properly, the customer failed to understand the caveats once it was deployed.... (more)

Xiotech ISE Analyzer

In April 2010 Xiotech launched our CorteX (RESTful) architecture and one of the first things we rolled out to show the power of RESTful was our iPhone/iPad monitoring app.  It was a great success and really spoke to the power of a simple, easy to write to, open architecture.  We then took it to the next level and created a website www.CorteXDeveloper.com and encouraged people to sign up and participate.  So what’s next? The thing we hear most in the storage industry is the need for robust reporting tools for the array’s these customers are running.  With that said, we created a ... (more)

My 10 Years With Xiotech

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 WOW! I'm very proud to say that today is my 10 year anniversary with Xiotech. What an awesome ride this has been. In those 10 years I've had an opportunity to work with some brilliant people. Some of them are still here at Xiotech, others have moved on to other endeavors, but each one has made an impact both professionally and personally on me. It just seems like it was just yesterday, sitting in the Minneapolis Decathlon Club Hotel (I think it's a water park now :) overwhelmed with a sense of "wow, this i... (more)

Xiotech Storage Blade – 101

How Xiotech Storage Blades have the potential to change the storage paradigm. It’s inevitable, whether I’m talking with a value added reseller (VAR) or a net-new prospect, I’m always asked to explain how our solution is so different then everyone else’s.  I figured it was a great opportunity to address this in a blog post.  Xiotech recently released a whitepaper authored by Jack Fegreus of OpenBench Labs.  His ISE overview was so spot on that I wanted to copy/paste some of the whitepaper here.  I would encourage you to read his full whitepaper as well, which includes his testing ... (more)

How to Design a Scale Out NAS Architecture

Scale-out architecture and why it is important when architecting a storage solution. I had an interesting discussion with an architectural firm the other day.  Most of the discussion was around scaling for the future.  In our discussion we talked about the linear scalability of the ISE technology and he pointed out that while that made a ton of sense for his block-access requirements he was a little concerned around the unstructured data, as well as some plans utilizing NFS for some of his server and desktop virtualization needs.  The last thing he wanted to worry about was chan... (more)