Storage industry innovator X-IO today announced that its advanced Intelligent Storage Element Hyper ISE was awarded two Best of TechEd Awards at the close of last week's Microsoft TechEd North America 2012 conference. The high-performance storage system, which fuses traditional hard disks and SSDs into a single pool of capacity, was named "Best Hardware and Storage Product" by the judging panel and -- for the second year in a row -- voted "Attendees' Pick" by conference attendees.

"It is extremely gratifying that both the judging panel and the show attendees recognized Hyper ISE's unmatched performance and value," said Rick Nelson, VP, X-IO. "Our record-breaking booth demonstration clearly showed that the ISE architecture delivers on our value proposition, providing excellent performance in real-world data-intensive applications and environments at costs considerably lower than other high-performance solutions."

The Best of TechEd Awards, produced by Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Pro, SharePoint Pro and Dev Pro, recognize the innovative products and services showcased at the annual Microsoft TechEd event. To determine this year's winners, the five-member judging panel narrowed a field of 260 submissions down to 46 finalists in 15 categories, then interviewed the finalists and evaluated each product on the criteria of strategic importance, competitive advantage and value to customers. The prestigious "Attendees' Pick" award, on the other hand, was determined by the votes of show attendees.

X-IO attracted considerable attention on the show floor with its booth demo, which showcased unprecedented price/performance involving Microsoft's new Windows Server 2012 RC. Running a single equipment rack of 10 ISE-2 Intelligent Storage with HP servers, Infiniband adapters and hardware from QLogic, the company attained a sustainable rate of over 15 gigabytes per second of throughput, achieving up to 100,000+ IOPS with high performance storage capacities exceeding 100 terabytes. The demonstration used only off-the-shelf commodity equipment, highlighting not only the speed of X-IO's Intelligent Storage Elements, but their real world usability and affordability in the data center.

X-IO designed its Intelligent Storage Elements and architecture from the ground up to accelerate enterprise applications and drive unmatched storage price/performance, even for big data needs. Each X-IO ISE unit is a completely self-contained storage building block. The Hyper ISE version features clustered on-board controllers that manage a performance pool comprised of both HDDs and SSDs. Exceptionally high throughput performance is achieved by X-IO's Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) software, which monitors I/Os in real-time, ensuring that high demand data hotspots reside on the faster SSD. ISE is uniquely designed to scale so that no matter how many ISE units are added to increase capacity, full storage performance is maintained. ISE units from X-IO are major environmental upgrades to a data center due to their low energy consumption and low HVAC loads.