From small to large enterprise IT sites, use of rich media in mainstream corporate applications, growing reliance on work group collaboration, the expanding use of virtualization for servers and desktop systems, along with the shift to disk-to-disk (D2D)) backup by IT, are all driving double-digit growth in storage requirements and creating a synergistic environment for storage architectures that can scale-out by capacity and by performance. To make new business models possible, storage must be available at a fraction of the traditional cost per gigabyte and administrators must be able to manage multiple petabytes of data.

The Xiotech Emprise 5000 storage device and its foundation component, the Xiotech Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), are designed to redefine the construct of a storage foundation building block. The idea is to provide a storage target that delivers application-specific requirements, such as I/O operations per second (IOPS), streaming data rates in MB per second, or dense storage capacity, and transcends old-line connection-centric notions of storage as simply a DAS-, NAS-, or SAN-connected device.