Xiotech’s recently introduced Hybrid ISE offering was selected as selected as “Breakthrough Product of the Year,” also receiving the “Attendee’s Pick” award at Microsoft Tech-Ed 2011. There were a total of 46 finalists at the conference, and Hybrid ISE was named the best product for the entire show.

“As Steve Sicola, Xiotech’s CTO simply put it, “We are extremely proud to receive these two prestigious honors. The technical rigor and evaluation that goes into this award process are exactly the environment in which the Hybrid ISE innovation truly shines.”

Xiotech introduced Hybrid ISE only this week, a performance-optimized hybrid storage blade housed in the same 3U (5.25 inches) footprint as the original ISE blades. It combines of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Disks (SSDs) in the same storage pool, and offers 60,000 IOPs in 3U modular storage blade, which is the highest IOPs/U in the industry according to Xiotech. The offering also features a great deal of automation, a hybrid media implementation with full T-10 DIF protection and more.

In addition to receiving these awards at Tech-Ed 2011 and launching Hybrid ISE, Xiotech had other developments recently as well. Among them was an announcement that Caronet is leveraging its ISE storage blades to power a new IaaS product called Carocloud. The hosting provider now offers customers enterprise cloud services.

A couple days before this announcement, Xiotech broke the news that it has been awarded the 5-Star Partner rating in CRN’s 2011 Partner Programs Guide, ensuring that the company is moving right along.  We expect some great announcements from them as we move forward with the year.