Applications are central to business, and the performance of those applications can mean the difference between market success and lost revenues. In order to keep pace with these applications, speed time to value and improve availability, IT has adopted technology innovations like virtualization and cloud. Many of these technologies, however, have not crossed the chasm from test and development into business and mission-critical workloads. One reason for the delay is the inefficiencies that are present in key infrastructure layers like storage. After five years of R&D into the root causes of these inefficiencies, Xiotech introduced a new storage paradigm called Intelligent Storage Element, or ISE, designed from the ground up to solve these problems. The result: solutions that enable business applications to manage, scale and seize control of storage environments delivering unprecedented performance, efficiency, reliability and business agility.