Argus Information & Advisory Services Purchased 16 Xiotech Systems

Xiotech Corporation announced that Argus Information & Advisory Services purchased 16 Emprise 5000 storage systems for its large data warehouse. Xiotech introduced the Emprise product line, using patented Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology, in April.

After conducting an extensive evaluation and testing process, Argus cited data throughput, ability to scale, and energy consumption as the primary factors in the purchase of the Emprise systems. The company found Xiotech was able to exceed its required 1 gigabyte per second of throughput with just two Emprise units, while also accommodating an expected growth in Argus’ data warehouse from 40 terabytes to more than 200 terabytes in the coming years. Power requirements were half that of other storage systems given comparable capacities and performance.

Based in White Plains, N.Y., Argus 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 a significant competitive advantage.

Argus also is a growing company and expects its raw storage to increase by a factor of five or more over the next few years. 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.

"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," said Nick Daffan, principal, Argus Information & Advisory Services. "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."

To meet Argus’ performance requirements, Xiotech provided three Emprise 5000 systems for the company to test.

"Each Emprise system delivered between 600 and 800 megabytes per second of throughput, and as we added Emprise units they scaled linearly," added Daffan. "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."

Emprise 5000 is a highly reliable, self-enclosed, direct- or switch-attached storage solution. The ISE technology used in the Emprise 5000 system supports linear scalability and more efficient storage utilization, and its reliable architecture means Argus never has to worry about drive failures — a commitment Xiotech supports with an industry-leading five-year warranty.

Argus expects to implement 16 Emprise systems this summer, and double that amount in the next 18 months. Recognizing the escalating price of energy, Argus carefully evaluated the power requirements of each storage system it evaluated, along with system performance, and found Emprise 5000 to be the best choice.

"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," added Daffan.

Xiotech’s ISE technology overcomes issues of traditional data storage solutions by tightly integrating drive, enclosure and controller software and firmware and by distributing much of the processing and cache into the enclosure for a more efficient storage system. This design also provides greatly improved and simplified scalability with storage elements that are 20 to 40 times the capacity of a typical disk drive and include internal processing power and cache needed to handle all drive management functions.

"Traditional storage systems are no longer keeping pace with the demands of today’s businesses," said Mike Hoch, vice president of Marketing, Xiotech. "We developed the Emprise systems, powered by ISE technology, in response to these new demands, and Argus’ purchase of several of them is important validation of the technology."