Xiotech, which has changed its name to XIO as of August this year, is betting a lot on its Hyper ISE (Integrated Storage Elements) product. CEO Alan Atkinson and chief enterprise architect Robert Stevenson discussed further in an interview with The Register.

Hyper ISE is a high-performance storage system that’s designed for virtualized deployments and brings together SSDs and disk drives. The all-in-one offering, which also includes upper level storage controller stack functionality, hasn’t seen wide adoption. However the latest version, Hyper, is the fastest selling launch product in the history of the company.  It’s facing a lot of competition from other players, including Fusion-io and Violin Memory, but Hyper ISE does have its advantages according to Atkinson:

“…Its biggest advantage is price due to the SSD and disk drive combination compared to pure solid state storage.”

He continued: “We can get more speed out of that box, because the data placement algorithm can be improved and customers get a speed boost via a firmware upgrade.”

XIO’s promise of a high-performance system has been verified by a recent study conducted by the Microsoft Partner Solutions Center, which now uses its offering as its tier 1 storage solution. In July, Hybrid ISE managed to pump out 60,000 I/O operations per second.

Virtualization is heating up in the SMG segment as well, and in particular the VDI space. Forrester published a report that advises execs to strategize the virtualization of workers’ desktops and apps more efficiently to avoid “reduced availability and performance, higher operational costs or poor end-user satisfaction.” Companies like Pano Logic have been working on optimizing their offerings to achieve the opposite.

In the open-source space, Puppet announced the second version of its configuration management tool, which now supports provisioning virtual machines directly on Amazon EC2 or VMware.