The IBM XIV system employs a storage architecture designed to provide the highest levels of performance, reliability, and functionality combined with unprecedented ease of management and exceptionally low TCO.

Pain: Performance and Availability
Business Impact: Business cannot afford downtime or loss of critical data. Critical business processes are slow due to application hot spots.
Benefits: Thin provisioning and self-tuning ensure consistent high performance and enable rapid applications deployment. Self-healing ensures against data loss and applications remain available.

Pain: Storage Growth and Costs Business
Impact: Decreased competitiveness due to storage capacity restrictions caused by inadequate budgets. Decreased efficiency of storage inhibits business responsiveness to market needs.
Benefits: Enterprise-class functionality at tier 2 costs. Thin provisioning and snapshot features help reduce costs

Pain: Management Complexity
Business Impact: Inability to respond quickly to business needs due to complex, manual storage administration. Decreased productivity due to IT staff skills.
Benefits: Innovative management reduces the time and skills required to manage storage environment.

The IBM XIV Storage System is designed to be a fully scalable enterprise storage system that is based upon a grid array of hardware components. It distributes I/O across all the drives in the system thereby providing automatic load balancing and avoiding the management overhead of creation and management of traditional RAID groups.

Thin provisioning or the capability to over-allocate storage is provided in the base software.

The advanced cloning capability enables the creation of up to 16,000 copies of any volume, with no performance penalties and Synchronous Remote Replication provides data protection from site disasters.

Management interfaces are provided through both the use of a very easy to use and intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Command Line Interface (CLI). Jim will cover these later on and we’ll have an ATS XIV Deep dive call to specifically cover the usability of the GUI.

The usage of any new storage system most likely requires the transfer of large amounts of data from the existing non-IBM XIV storage system to the new storage system. The built in Data Migration feature enables production to be maintained while the data transfer is in progress. This capability provides another option to our customers in addition to the Softek Data Mobility Solutions provided by IBM Services.

• Server consolidation or server virtualization projects

• Enterprise companies with 500+ employees

• Desire for more flexible, fast, simple and/or cost effective storage provisioning for their application environments

• Web 2.0

• Considering or using grid computing model

• Data centers needing to reduce space and power

• Direct attach storage or SAN infrastructures supporting server and application deployments, 20TB Useable capacity requirement Please click on the following links to download key sales materials

• Product overview
• Fact Sheet
• Sales Guide
• Call Guide

Please click on the link below to access valuable technical support materials

• Technical overview
• IBM XIV Redbook