IBM XIV Storage System

Smarter Architecture

Your organisation is scalable, flexible and reliable. Here's the storage solution - That's a perfect match.

To succeed in today's business environment, your business needs to be scalable, flexible and reliable. The IBM XIV Storage System is a revolutionary high-end open disk system designed to support current and future enterprise business requirements for highly available information infrastructure. It is a core component of the IBM information infrastructure will help you address your needs for availability, security, compliance and retention of information.

The need for a smarter grid architecture for the enterprise

The explosive growth of data, and specifically the management of this data, has presented a challenge that organisations like yours are struggling to find solutions for. The cost and complexity of managing the data; storage tiers, data classification and performance tuning is rising sharply as the amount of data increases.

The IBM XIV solution can help your organisation meet these challenges

IBM acquired XIV in mid 2008, creating a competitive differentiator in disk storage for the IBM XIV Storage System. IBM/XIV have developed the next generation storage technology; a tier 1 storage system based on a leading edge grid technology that will redefine current metrics around performance, scalability, functionality and cost of ownership.

The IBM XIV storage solutions offers:

High performance. Full exploitation of the grid system resources including disks, CPUs, and switches combined with unique caching algorithms translates into excellent performance
High reliability. Systems components are protected in an N+1 active-active design to help ensure the highest levels of reliability and availability expected in the Enterprise
Reduce data centre costs. Very low space utilisation and power consumption around 1/5th of existing storage systems of similar capacity
Reduced risk of impact from disk failure. The system's exceptionally short rebuild process allows a 1 TB disk drive to be re-built in 30 minutes or less, and with no impact to system performance
Near-instantaneous snapshots. The system's smarter architecture enables an unlimited number of snapshot copies of data to be created and made available instantly, with no impact to system performance
Protection against site failure. Inbuilt remote mirroring software provides protection against primary site outages, disasters and site failures
Reduce storage costs. Thin provisioning allows logical volumes to exceed physical capacity, while the latter only need be large enough to contain the data actually written. This smarter flexibility can offer dramatic savings in storage, power and space cost
In-built data migration facility. Enables the migration of volumes automatically from legacy systems to the IBM XIV Storage System, copying information while applications are online.