IBM XIV Storage System

Storage reinvented: Powerful, virtualized, easy-to-manage, cloud-agile enterprise storage

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Produc design award 2012.

 

Highlights

  • A revolutionary, proven, high-end disk storage system designed for data growth and unmatched ease of use
  • Consistent high performance without hotspots, enabled through massive parallelism and self tuning
  • Virtualized storage, easy provisioning and extreme agility for optimized cloud and virtual environments
  • Extra performance boost option through management-free SSD caching
  • High reliability and availability via full redundancy, self healing and unprecedented rebuild speed
  • Low TCO enabled by high-density storage, simplified planning, cost-free features and low-touch management

As the planet becomes smarter—more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent—your business faces the dual challenges of managing a staggering amount of information and extracting the most value from that information. Your employees, partners and customers depend on that information. In fact, to succeed today, organizations must have the ability to store all this information securely and reliably and to access it speedily whenever it is needed. Having the right storage is fundamental to an IT infrastructure that enables growth. Your ultimate aim is to find a solution that meets high-end requirements for performance, reliability and flexibility while keeping storage costs and complexity to a minimum.

The IBM® XIV® Storage System is high-end disk storage that supports these contrasting goals. Efficient by design and born optimized to simplify storage, the XIV Storage System exemplifies IBM Smarter Storage for Smarter Computing, empowering thousands of organizations worldwide to take control of their storage and to gain valuable insights from their data. Designed for consistent Tier 1 performance and five-nines availability, XIV storage offers low total cost of ownership (TCO) and addresses even the most demanding workloads. Never compromising performance for reliability, the XIV grid architecture delivers massive parallelism—resulting in uniform allocation of system resources at all times.

IBM helps unleash the power of enterprise cloud computing with XIV storage and its leading combination of high performance and low TCO, particularly in IP SAN environments:

  • Up to five times iSCSI throughput increase with 10 GbE connectivity, delivering cost-effective, high performance storage to enterprises running clouds with VMware, Hyper-V, and Openstack on IP SANs1
  • Additional boost of up to 4.5 times with IBM XIV SSD Caching (optional), accelerating access to data from all applications with zero management, at a fraction of typical SSD storage costs1
  • Support for Windows Server 2012 enables customers to tap into the latest Microsoft features of Microsoft Hyper-V, VSS, and MSCS
  • Support for Windows Server 2012 space reclamation allows customers to make optimal use of XIV thin provisioning in Windows 2012 environments
  • Unparalleled disk rebuild times reduced by 60% – a fully utilized 2 TB drive under heavy load can now be rebuilt in only 26 minutes
  • System energy consumption reduced by up to 16 percent, helping customers contain costs and execute green data center strategies

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1 Performance data was obtained in an IBM lab environment under simulated conditions and is presented as an illustration. Performance obtained in other operating environments may vary, and customers should conduct their own testing.

ITG cost/benefit case

 

IDC Analyst Report on XIV

 

Clipper Group

 

Evaluator Group analyst paper