EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn., February 17, 2004 - XIOtech Corporation, a storage networking innovator, today announced that it has formalized its reseller agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc., which will allow the two companies to deliver storage networking solutions featuring XIOtech® Magnitude 3DTM storage arrays and the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Intelligent directors and fabric switches.
XIOtech has tested and qualified the Cisco MDS 9500, 9200, and 9100 series on Magnitude 3D and will resell the Cisco switches through its direct and indirect sales channels. Based on the strengths of the Magnitude 3DTM storage solution, XIOtech will focus on selling the joint storage area networking (SAN) solution to small and mid-tier enterprise accounts, typically characterized as organizations with between 100 to 1000 employees.
"Magnitude 3D's unmatched usability and robust design combined with the advanced features of the Cisco MDS 9000 have given us a vital combination of ease of use, high reliability and powerful support," said Al Stern, Systems Manager at University of Dayton.
"As SAN adoption matures among small to mid-size companies, the value of intelligent network services, solutions integration, and ease-of-management becomes increasingly important," said Soni Jiandani, vice president of Marketing for the Storage Technology Group at Cisco. "Both XIOtech and Cisco bring years of experience in providing solutions for smaller enterprises, which the companies will take advantage of through joint sales engagements and solution deployments."
The combination of Magnitude 3D and Cisco's storage solutions allows companies to quickly and cost-effectively deploy and manage an enterprise-class storage area network (SAN) with in-place IT staffing and without expensive storage specialists. Additionally, the integration of Magnitude 3D's Geo-Replication Services with Cisco's fiber channel switches enables customers to replicate data between a local storage cluster to geographically distributed IP clusters, delivering a disaster-resilience approach that features the industry's fastest Time-to-Restore. XIOtech and Cisco have already successfully delivered storage networking solutions for customers within the financial, healthcare, education, and government markets. Joint customers include Wells Fargo, Nintendo, City of Overland Park, and many others.
"The Cisco MDS 9000 brings storage intelligence to the switch fabric, while Magnitude 3D brings dynamic simplicity to management of the storage area network," said Rebel Brown, EVP, Strategy and Corporate Development. "The combined solution delivers an enterprise-class SAN that can be easily deployed and managed by mid-tier organizations."
Magnitude 3D's dynamic simplicity significantly reduces storage total cost of ownership (TCO), making it an ideal storage networking solution for small and mid-tier enterprises. This simplicity is delivered within a next-generation, clustered storage environment - providing the extra benefits of enterprise-class resilience and scale. Cisco's family of SAN switches combines a flexible architecture with multiple layers of network and storage intelligence, reducing TCO and enabling highly available and scalable storage networks.
Launched in August 2003, Magnitude 3D is the optimum solution for businesses looking for enterprise-class SANs that are affordable and easy to manage. Magnitude 3D's innovative architecture applies the benefits of clustered computing to SANs while eliminating the complexity traditionally associated with SAN management. In a recent study by Enterprise Management Associates, Magnitude 3D was proven to provide a customer 770% ROI in the first year after installation, 2130% after three years, and a payback period of just seven weeks.
XIOtech will resell Cisco's products in packaged solutions along with Magnitude 3D, in accordance with the newly introduced Cisco Storage Technology Integrator (STI) program. Cisco STI partners are technology manufacturers that sell, service and support specific vertical market solutions directly or indirectly to customers as part of a complete solution. Companies participating in XIOtech's Dimensional Partner Program will also sell the packaged solutions. Magnitude 3D storage solutions featuring Cisco storage networking products are available immediately.
About the Cisco MDS 9000 Family
Consisting of the award-winning Cisco MDS 9500 series of Multilayer directors, the Cisco MDS 9216 and the Cisco MDS 9100 Multilayer fabric switches, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family provides a full line of products to meet requirements across storage networks of all sizes and architectures. With intelligent networking features such as multi-protocol/multi-transport integration, Virtual SANs (VSANs), advanced security, sophisticated debug/analysis tools and unified SAN management, as well as intelligent storage services such as network-based virtualization, the Cisco MDS 9000 Family ushers in a new era of storage networking.
About XIOtech:
Founded with the express goal of blending storage technology innovation with enhanced usability, XIOtech® challenges the status quo of traditional storage networking design. XIOtech has continuously demonstrated technology leadership, chalking up an impressive array of innovations culminating in Magnitude 3D, the industry's first distributed clustered storage solution. Today, Magnitude 3D storage solutions continue to deliver on a fundamental XIOtech promise: enable customers to "do more with less." This demonstrated blend of innovation and usability led XIOtech to recently win the silver award in the "Disk and Disk Subsystems" category of Storage and SearchStorage.com's 2003 Products of the Year Awards. In September 2003 XIOtech also won the Deloitte & Touche Fast 50 Award—naming XIOtech as the fastest growing technology company in Minnesota with growth in excess of 4900% over the preceding 5 years.
Current customers and partners include Warner Bros., Merrill Lynch, Bechtel, Lucent, Hibernia Bank, and St. Vincent Hospital. XIOtech has also partnered with industry leaders such as Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, VERITAS, Brocade, and QLogic. XIOtech is based in Eden Prairie, Minn. For more information, visit www.XIOtech.com, email info@XIOtech.com, or call toll free 1.866.472.6764.
