IBM XIV Storage System

Virtualized storage for a balanced cloud ecosystem, XIV accelerates implementations, provides consistent high performance, and meets service level goals—with minimal management.

XIV offers key cloud-enabling features:

• Effective resource sharing: XIV delivers outstanding hotspot-free performance with heterogeneous workloads, supporting quality of service commitments in dynamic virtualized environments such as VMware, Hyper-V, and PowerVM.
• Easy and automated management: XIV’s low-touch management, highly intuitive GUI, and self-tuning architecture create a benchmark for simplicity in achieving quick cloud results. XIV offers comprehensive reporting tools and integrates flexibly with billing systems, facilitating chargeback.
• Super elasticity: XIV scales performance with capacity and is designed for agility with rapid, on-demand, self-service provisioning and thin allocation.
• High availability and robust data protection: Powerful internal redundancy, snapshots, replication, and self-healing, as well as hot upgrades and non-disruptive maintenance, help keep data safe, sound, and available – and ensure business continuity.

Read IBM XIV white paper on enabling storage for cloud environments (2.44MB)

A large majority of Fortune 100 companies rely on IBM cloud solutions.

See more videos and case studies

The XIV series provides predictable and consistent high performance without hotspots. Its powerful grid architecture is designed to deliver the same high service level to all applications -- even through peak load periods, rebuilds, and maintenance. Here’s how:

• Distributed, massively parallel architecture: All the data is distributed automatically and evenly across all modules and disks all the time, without manual tuning.
• Huge bandwidth: With excellent connectivity between every module, XIV uses its enormous aggregate bandwidth to ensure high service levels. XIV Gen3 features an InfiniBand backplane for even greater speed.
• Huge processing resources: Every module has its own multi-core processor, so dozens of CPU cores are at the rack’s disposal, used to ensure performance through efficient cache management that produces higher cache hit rates.
• High performance even during disk rebuild: A distributed rebuild mechanism engages all disks in the system during the rebuild process, minimizing impact and keeping performance consistent.

Get the power: Straight talk on XIV Gen3 performance (3:00min)

Download the XIV storage performance white paper (1.3MB)

Read how the XIV system delivers amazing performance for diverse application needs:

XIV uses its grid architecture, massive parallelism, and powerful distributed rebuild mechanism to provide outstanding reliability and availability. Here’s how:

• Active-active redundancy: Key system components -- disk drives, modules, switches, UPS units, and connectivity -- are fully redundant and protected through active-active N+1 redundancy.
• Rebuild in just minutes: XIV typically completes a 2TB disk rebuild in approximately 33 minutes, with minimal impact on system service.
• Self healing: When a disk fails -- and even before, upon detecting issues -- XIV automatically redistributes the workload to the other disks and returns the system to full redundancy rapidly and without human intervention.
• Business continuity solutions: XIV helps you keep your organization up and running with easy to implement solutions for synchronous and asynchronous replication, clustering, failover, and recovery.

Download the XIV storage business continuity white paper (352KB)

Read how XIV keeps your data safe and available:

IBM XIV simplifies storage management in many ways including: sparing users the need to manage distribution of logical volumes across physical disks and carry out performance troubleshooting; providing a remarkably intuitive, widely lauded GUI and easy-to-use management tools provided with the software at no extra charge; and liberating administrators with an on-the-go mobile app.

• Simple GUI and centralized console: Provides one-stop administration of multiple XIV systems and anytime, anywhere monitoring with the IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard for the Apple iPad.
• Powerful command line interface (CLI): Supports complex scripting for tight host and application integration.
• Minimal training and expertise: Makes it easy to carry out any storage task, from creating volumes and mirrors to generating reports.
• Built-in management tools (software): Provide a powerful, fully integrated set of software capabilities including snapshots, thin provisioning, remote mirroring, data migration, instant space reclamation, and real-time reporting.

Hear what some customers say:

See more videos and case studies

The XIV system is a perfect storage foundation for virtualized infrastructures, designed to provide:

• Hotspot-free performance: With massive parallelism and self-load-balancing, XIV delivers steady high performance without manual tuning across diverse workloads.
• Outstanding flexibility: Modular, with high density drives, XIV offers exceptional levels of consolidation and scalability, non-disruptive self-service provisioning, and thin allocation on demand.
• Unmatched low-touch simplicity: XIV makes managing storage easy and efficient with a best-practice GUI, rich management tools, and a mobile device app
• Best-of-breed VMware solutions: Driven by the global XIV-VMware alliance, solutions run deep and span:
  • Monitoring and policy-based storage deployment with a VASA provider
  • Option of controlled storage provisioning through a vCenter plug-in
  • Enhanced server scalability and performance with VAAI hardware support
  • Automated storage failover with a VMware Site Recovery Manager adapter

Watch "A Perfect Fit: IBM XIV and VMware" (3:51min) 

View the IBM VMware vCenter Demo featuring XIV (9:30min) 

The great majority of IBM XIV customers use XIV with VMware, Hyper-V, PowerVM, and other hypervisors to optimize their storage-server virtualization environments:

The IBM XIV series provides proven, easily implemented, cost-efficient solutions with Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Oracle, Symantec, IBM, and others, with the highest levels of partner support. Cost-free XIV Host Attachment Kits (HAKs) seamlessly configure best-practice platform-native multipath solutions for IBM AIX®, Microsoft Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, SLES Linux, and RedHat Linux.

• Virtualization: Great server virtualization synergy;see more under IBM XIV Benefits, Optimized for Virtual Platforms.
• Business applications: Consistent high performance and simple management with leading email, database, ERP and other enterprise applications.
• Storage management: Powerful solutions with IBM Tivoli products, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, VMware vCenter, Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation, and other SMI-S compliant systems.
• Data protection and business continuity: Extended solutions for backup, clustering, automated storage failover, and instant application-aware hardware snapshots.
• Integrated storage: Virtualized storage management behind IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC); delivery of network attached storage (NAS) capabilities with N-series gateway or SONAS; deduplication archiving with IBM ProtecTIER.

Download the ESRP report highlighting IBM XIV Gen3 resiliency with Exchange 2010

See details on the XIV interoperability matrix (SSIC) and read about customer solution success:

See more videos and case studies

IBM XIV delivers a set of robust management tools to help you get the most out of your data -- all are provided with the system software at no extra charge, managed through the GUI or CLI and ready for use:

• Snapshots and mirroring: Thousands of snapshots with near-zero performance impact; flexible remote mirroring (schedules, RPO ranges, and other options).
• Thin provisioning and instant space reclamation: Flexible logical volume allocation by storage pool; integrations with Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation and other products provide instant space reclamation.
• Centralized administration: One-stop managing of multiple XIV systems, with real-time performance monitoring, a powerful CLI for scripting, and much more.
• Data migration: Performs rapid, automated, space-efficient online migration of data from any non-XIV system to the XIV system.
• Reporting: Stores and flexibly displays a year’s performance and capacity use.

See what our customers say about the value that XIV features bring to their productivity:

Get more case studies and videos