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IBM's integrated approach to storage makes it easy for you to add individual products to your infrastructure, or gain maximum advantage through an end-to-end, scalable solution. Our industry and technical experts are available to create an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy designed specifically for your current and future needs

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Storage management

SAN Volume Controller: Setting the standards for ease of use and powerful virtualization capabilities

Cost effective and highly utilized storage infrastructure

IBM System Storage with SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is designed to support a tiered storage environment in which the cost of storage can be better matched to the value of data while combining storage capacity from multiple heterogeneous disk systems. This creates a single reservoir of capacity that can be better managed as a business resource across all tiers and drive down storage costs.

SVC features enable administrators to implement tiered storage to optimize storage device selection and management without impacting ongoing operations. This is designed to reduce overall storage costs. Virtualization can also allow you to achieve dramatic reductions in energy consumption while maintaining high performance. And by increasing utilization of storage through SVC, customers can significantly increase energy savings.

IBM's flagship storage virtualization solution (SVC) has delivered outstanding Storage Performance Council (SPC) benchmark results, demonstrating that it is the highest performing storage virtualization solution in the world today.¹ A recent study of SVC customers by Forrester Consulting² found that SVC can help improve storage utilization by as much as 30 percent and helps reduce storage growth by as much as 20 percent. IBM has more than 10,000 SVC engine running in more than 3,400 SVC Systems worldwide — making it the most successful and mature storage virtualization solution on the market today.

IBM SVC vs EMC Invista: a closer look

*IBM SVC vs EMC Invista*
FEATURES	IBM SVC	EMC Invista
Leading SPC benchmark result^[1]	YES	NA
Single Point of Control	YES	NO
Scalability and non-disruptive growth to meet customer's needs	YES (Entry point to meet midrange customer needs with nondisruptive upgradeability to enterprise-class scale)	NO (Higher entry point with limited scalability)
Extensive heterogeneous server and storage support	YES	Limited
Supports Remote copy	YES	NO
Single source for server, disk, tape, software, services, and financing	YES	NO
Scalability and non-disruptive growth to meet customer's needs	YES (Entry point to meet midrange customer needs with nondisruptive upgradeability to enterprise-class scale)	NO (Higher entry point with limited scalability)

An analysis by the Taneja Group: IBM SAN volume controller tames the storage beast

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IBM has shipped over 10,000 SAN Volume controller units.

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¹ The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is the highest performing distributed, virtualized disk storage solution. Industry standard benchmarks, such as those from the Storage Performance Council (SPC), help to enable varifiable verifiable storage performance comparisons. SVC 4.2 with 16 distributed IBM System Storage DS4700s produced 272,505 SPC-1 IOPSTM. See http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#A00052.

²The Total Economic Impact™ Of IBM® System Storage™ SAN Volume Controller Multicompany Analysis, Forrester Consulting, September 30, 2006. See http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03004c/servers/storage/software/virtualization/wpapers/forrester_svc.pdf.