Xiotech, the storage company that has been hitting the channel with its ISE storage solutions, is reshaping itself. I spoke to Alan Atkinson, president and CEO of Xiotech about the changes, the first of which is a new name. Xiotech will now be known as XIO Storage, with a new device at the helm, the Hyper ISE. Here’s the quick scoop …

Atkinson said Xiotech is at a point transitioning to maintain its forward momentum thus far. “We sold every Hybrid ISE we built,” he said, ” [and] it opened a door to a new direction.” Part of that is new direction is a new name for the company: XIO Storage. “It [stands for] ‘extreme storage, and I like that. It’s about performance-driven storage. It’s not a small space [to compete in]. Lots of hot companies are in this space, but what we’re announcing with Hyper ISE … it’s the next turn of the crank.”

Hyper ISE, an SSD and HDD storage solution, will offer something unique, with 200,000 IOPS priced at $100,000. Hyper ISE, the evolution of the Hybrid ISE solution, is XIO’s unique way of using SSDs and HDDs with a special algorithm that doesn’t just put frequently accessed data straight to the SDD, it’s actually smart enough to understand application behavior, pushing random and non-sequential data into the SSD to instantly improve read times. Atkinson said sequential data on an HDD can be read as fast as it can on an SSD, but its seeking time hurts speed. Hyper ISE apparently fixes all those problems. If one Hyper ISE isn’t enough, XIO has you covered with a new storage technology dubbed X-Volume, which allows for 5 Hyper ISE units to work together, boasting 1 million IOPS inside a 15U unit.

XIO apparently has some fans with the new Hyper ISE technology, and Atkinson said Microsoft was impressed. Not just because of the aforementioned smart application storage intelligence (which only takes 12 hours to learn an application) but also because the XIO Hyper ISE remains at peak performance even when the appliance is at full capacity. Atkinson noted most other storage solutions are kept with some remaining overhead to ensure no slowdowns.

Couple XIO’s new technology with Atkinson’s promise of “juicy” new channel incentives and the recent hiring of EMC’s Doug O’Shaughnessy to XIO’s VP of services position, and there’s good reason we’ll be keeping XIO on our radar screen. We’ll be especially interested to see if Hyper ISE, X-Volume and the new channel incentives live up to the “extreme” nature of XIO’s promises.