Xiotech Introduces CorteX API

Xiotech Corporation introduced the Xiotech CorteX API as a new way for partners and customers to unlock the power of its Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, as well as another industry-first component in the company’s Intelligent Application Storage architecture.

CorteX is based on a RESTful architecture, and allows ISE to be easily integrated into software as an application resource to control or automate storage management. These applications include storage resource management, hypervisors, messaging applications, database, datacenter automation or custom-developed scripts or applets.

Xiotech also is launching a community to support CorteX development. Visitors to this site can learn more about CorteX, share software code and best practices, see sample code and start building CorteX applications.

"Cloud storage presents tremendous opportunities for organizations to become more nimble and agile, and Olocity’s standards-based, open source offerings are designed to remove some of the proprietary barriers that hinder efficient storage management," said Hope Hines, Chief Operating Officer, Olocity Corporation. "Xiotech is the ideal partner, augmenting our efforts by facilitating integration through ISE and CorteX’s REST-based API, improving customers’ ability for dynamic capacity planning and enabling more informed, actionable storage policies."

Another CorteX-enabled feature is available today as a service option: ISE migration. This makes it possible to move a volume from one ISE to another, and unlike other systems, does not require a lengthy application outage while data is transferred. For example, a volume which requires additional performance can be migrated to an ISE with higher-performance DataPacs. ISE migration can be controlled with CorteX, allowing control of migration activities directly by intelligent applications as well as through storage management consoles.

"Applications are becoming more aware of the storage they are using, and using that knowledge to position the right data on the right tier of storage," said Jim McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at Xiotech. "ISE migration provides applications with a way of positioning the data with help from the storage, rather than automated tiering systems that are purely in-array and move data without understanding its value to the applications and hence the business. The result is that applications can run more efficiently and serve the business better."

In addition, CorteX is the ‘secret sauce’ behind ICON Manager’s updated Virtual View, launched in March as part of the ISE Virtualization Performance Pack. Due to the simplicity of CorteX, Virtual View reduces virtual server provisioning and storage allocation from more than a dozen steps and three interfaces to only three steps and one interface.

"ISE was conceived as the perfect scale-out building block for storage environments, and CorteX unlocks its limitless potential," said Steve Sicola, Xiotech CTO. "Our vision is for customers to be able to deploy a ‘field of ISE bricks’ and have that army at the beck and call of applications, servers and the business itself without reservation or restriction."

CorteX Community Building
CorteX, as a RESTful API, allows for easy development and execution of scripts that can automate everything from provisioning and partitioning to health monitoring and chargeback. This capability and control over storage elements is a unique value-add to data centers, and one of the three key tenants of Xiotech’s Intelligent Application Storage architecture.

The flexibility of writing to Web Services within ISE can be seen in Microsoft’s SANMan application, which is hosted in the MSDN Code Gallery. SANMan was developed to automate a host of tasks and functions in the creation and management of ISE-based storage area networks (SANs).

Built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and written in C# using .NET Remoting and SQL Server as a data store, SANMan can:

• Create, delete and move VDisks, including mounting, partition and volume management and drive formatting on the server.
• Monitor the health of the SANs, including power supplies, temperature sensors, bay/controller/driver health and more.

A number of other applications have been posted to the CorteX community. One example is the STAT5000, which offers the ability to monitor comprehensive performance and state related information across a host of ISE units in a single screen. This applet was designed and coded in one day, demonstrating the ease of leveraging the RESTful interface for writing to ISE.