IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller

Simplified and centralized management for your storage infrastructure

Feature Benefits
Single point-of-control for storage resources
  • Designed to increase management efficiency
  • Designed to help support business application availability
Pools the storage capacity of multiple storage systems on a SAN
  • Helps you manage storage as a resource to meet business requirements and not just as a set of boxes
  • Helps administrators better deploy storage as required beyond traditional “SAN islands”
  • Can help increase utilization of storage assets
  • Insulates applications from physical changes to the storage infrastructure
Clustered pairs of “storage engines” based on IBM System x technology
  • Highly reliable hardware foundation for the SAN Volume Controller appliance
  • Designed to avoid single points of hardware failure
IBM Real-time Compression
  • Increases effective capacity of storage systems up to five times, helping lower cost, floor space requirements, power, and cooling
  • May be used with a wide range of data, including active primary data, for dramatic savings
Innovative and tightly integrated support for SSDs
  • Designed to deliver ultra-high performance capability for critical application data
  • SAN Volume Controller architecture scales SSD performance and capacity up to 12.8 TB and 800,000 read I/Os per second, yet has a small entry configuration, which helps make SSD more affordable
  • Move data to and from SSD without disruption; make copies of SSD data onto HDD
Scalable to support 1024 host servers
  • Provides room for growth as demanded by business conditions
Easy-to-use graphical management interface
  • Single interface for storage configuration, management and service tasks regardless of storage vendor. Based on the XIV GUI designed to make SAN Volume Controller even easier, more productive to use and able to be accessed from anywhere on the network with a web browser.
  • Helps administrators use their existing storage assets more efficiently.
Dynamic data migration
  • Migrate data among devices without taking applications using that data offline
  • Manage and scale storage capacity without disrupting applications
Manage tiered storage
  • Helps balance performance needs against infrastructure costs in a tiered storage environment
Advanced network-based copy services
  • Copy data across multiple storage systems with FlashCopy
  • Get faster recovery from disk backups with Reverse FlashCopy that is designed to enable almost instant recovery from disk backup copies
  • Copy data across metropolitan and global distances as needed to create high-availability storage solutions
  • Help reduce cost for business continuity with new Multiple Cluster Mirror function that helps enable a single consolidated disaster recovery center supporting up to three production data centers
Enhanced stretched cluster configurations
  • Concurrent access to a single copy of data from data centers up to 300km apart
  • Non-disruptive storage and virtual machine mobility between data centers
Thin provisioning and “snapshot” replication
  • Dramatically reduce physical storage requirements by using physical storage only when data changes
  • Improve storage administrator productivity through automated on-demand storage provisioning
iSCSI support for server attachment
  • iSCSI attachment avoids the cost of fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) in servers and reduces the need for fibre channel switches. This new capability may be particularly attractive for IBM BladeCenter server configurations.
Support for FCOE protocol
  • New support for FCOE protocol which helps simplify storage infrastructure through the use of converged networks
  • Simplify the data center and ease management using the same network for storage, WAN and LAN
IBM Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy Manager application-aware snapshots
  • Performs near-instant application-aware snapshot backups, with minimal performance impact for DB2®, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange
  • Provides advanced, granular restoration of Microsoft Exchange data
  • Supports clustered application environments (MSCS or VCS on Microsoft Windows and IBM HACMP™ on IBM AIX®) as well as Microsoft Exchange 2007 continuous replication configurations (LCR, CCR and SCR)

  • Storwize family Financing

    Easy, affordable IBM Storwize systems payment options


  • Taneja Group analyst report

    Reduce costs with IBM Real-time Compression and SAN Volume Controller


  • Increase effective storage capacity

    SVC now offers integrated Real-time Compression designed to be used with active primary data


  • Forrester paper on SVC

    The Total Economic Impact Of IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller

Java COMPATIBLE