Colorado Springs, CO, November 26, 2012 - Storage industry innovator X-IO today announced that its advanced Intelligent Storage system Hyper ISE has won two gold medals in the Penton Technology Group's 2012 Editor's Best Awards. For the second year in a row, both Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro have awarded the product highest honors in the "Best Hardware: Storage" category.

"For our 2012 Editors' Best Awards, we've leveraged the industry expertise of our editors and authors to bring additional recognition to great products in today's market," said Jason Bovberg, senior editor, Windows IT Pro. "We're proud to now share this invaluable information with our Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro communities. The 2012 winners should be extremely proud of this recognition from our editorial experts."

Editors' Best awards are given to products that Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro editors believe are the best of breed products in their respective categories. Products and services are evaluated for their strategic importance to the market, competitive advantages, and value to the customer.

"It is truly an honor to receive these accolades from Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro, two of the most respected IT publications on the market," said Rick Nelson, VP, X-IO. "We are gratified that the editors have once again recognized Hyper ISE's superior reliability, energy efficiency and price/performance value, all backed by our unprecedented five-year warranty."

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.