IBM XIV Storage System series

Virtualized storage ideal for a cloud ecosystem, XIV accelerates implementations and provides predictable high performance for meeting service level goals—with little-to-no management. Enabling features include:

• Effective resource sharing: XIV delivers hotspot-free performance and high service levels for mixed workloads, including dynamic environments, and Quality of Service and SSD caching for specific needs.
• Low-touch management: The simple management console and self-tuning architecture help accelerate cloud implementation. Reporting tools and flexible integration with billing systems facilitate 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: Internal redundancy, snapshots, replication, self-healing, hot upgrades, and non-disruptive maintenance help keep data safe and available – ensuring business continuity.

Want to build a Hyper-V cloud with XIV? Read the solution brief (2.5MB)

Read the white paper on XIV for cloud environments (2.44MB)

A large majority of Fortune 100 companies rely on IBM cloud solutions. Here are a just a few:

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XIV storage provides predictable high performance without hotspots – even during disk rebuild – through a powerful grid architecture designed to consistently deliver the same high service level to all applications:

• Distributed, massively parallel architecture: XIV distributes data automatically and evenly across all modules, disks, and caches without manual tuning. The rebuild process engages all disks, minimizing performance impact.
• Distributed cache: Smart, flexible caching uses large slots for reads while managing a smaller slot size, creating a high cache hit ratio. Optional XIV Gen3 SSD caching hugely boosts performance across all volumes.
• Huge bandwidth: XIV uses enormous inter- and intra-module bandwidth to ensure low latency; XIV Gen3 features an InfiniBand backplane for even greater speed.
• Massive processing power: Every module has its own multi-core processor – dozens of CPU cores powering each rack – to ensure performance through efficient cache management that produces higher cache hit rates.

Read the IDC report on XIV for Tier 1 apps

Learn more about XIV performance – now with SSD caching (1.28MB)

Straight talk on XIV Gen3 performance (00:03:01)

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

XIV grid architecture is designed to help ensure outstanding reliability and availability:

• 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 minutes: XIV typically completes a 3TB disk rebuild in approximately 50 minutes, with minimal impact on system service.
• Proactive self-healing: When a disk fails or upon detecting an imminent issue, XIV automatically redistributes the workload to other disks and rapidly returns to full redundancy.
• Business continuity solutions: XIV helps you keep your organization up and running with easy to implement solutions for synchronous and asynchronous mirroring, clustering, failover, and recovery.

Read the XIV asynchronous mirroring white paper (3.1MB)

Download the white paper on XIV for business continuity (352KB)

Read how XIV keeps your data safe and available:

Just how does XIV simplify storage management? Easy provisioning, tuning-free, an acclaimed GUI, friendly CLI, mobile apps… the list goes on. Bundled tools at no extra cost simplify day-to-day deployment.

• 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 iPhone and iPad.
• Powerful command line interface (CLI): Supports complex scripting for host and application integration.
• Minimal training: IT staff with all levels of expertise can hit the ground running fast on XIV.
• Built-in management tools: GUI-integrated functions include snapshots, thin provisioning, remote mirroring, data migration, instant space reclamation, and real-time reporting.

Monitor XIV from the palm of your hand (00:01:01)

The XIV user experience is second to none: See for yourself

Sounds too easy to be true? Hear what XIV customers say:

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As virtualized storage, XIV is optimized for applications hosted on virtualized servers. Integrating smoothly with VMware, Hyper-V, and PowerVM , it makes a perfect storage foundation for virtualized infrastructures:

• Hotspot-free performance: With massive parallelism and automated load-balancing, XIV delivers steady high performance without manual tuning across diverse workloads.
• Low-touch ease of use: Easy management with a best-practice GUI, friendly CLI, and rich functions.
• Agile provisioning and scaling: Modular, with high density drives, XIV offers administration-free consolidation and scalability, non-disruptive provisioning, and thin allocation on demand.
• Best-of-breed VMware solutions: The IBM-VMware alliance spawns broad and deep XIV solutions:
  • Controlled self-service storage provisioning and powerful management with a vCenter plug-in
  • VAAI support that leverages VMware best storage practices
  • Monitoring and policy-based storage deployment with a VASA provider
  • Automated, reliable storage failover with XIV adapter for SRM

Download the VMware solution brief (291KB)

Read the XIV for VMware vSphere infrastructures white paper (663KB)

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

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

XIV provides easily implemented, cost-efficient solutions with Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Oracle, Symantec, IBM, and others. Cost-free XIV Host Attachment Kits seamlessly configure platform-native multipath solutions for IBM AIX®, MS Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, SLES Linux, and RedHat Linux.

• Virtualization: Great server virtualization synergy with VMware, Hyper-V, and PowerVM.
• Business applications: Steady high performance with email, database, ERP, analytics, and other 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, including with Tivoli products, for backup, clustering, automated storage failover, and instant application-aware hardware snapshots.
• Integrated storage: Virtualized management behind IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC); network attached storage (NAS) capabilities with N-series gateway or SONAS; deduplication archiving with IBM ProtecTIER.

Read the brief on XIV end-to-end solutions with VMware (291KB)

See just how highly resilient XIV is with Exchange 2010 (1.89MB)

Learn why IBM is ideal for Oracle environments (560KB)

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

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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:

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