XIV

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The changing face of storage . . .

Imagine a highly available virtualised storage solution based on a grid architecture innovatively designed to provide unprecedented ease of management and with the added benefit of reduced storage costs.

The storage market has been dominatedby controller based storage for over 2 decades and in that time administrators and vendors have become adept at working within it’s limitations and managing it’s complexity. The storage market is now starting to see the emergence of a new type of architecture which scales, is easily managed and delivers on performance and availability.

The XIV platform from IBM is designed around a virtualised, massively parallel grid architecture which eliminates the requirement for a tiered approach to storage (and the associated costs). This enables far higher utilisation levels than traditional solutions and significantly impacts the environmental and operational costs associated with managing an enterprise storage environment. The combination of these capabilities means that users can significantly reduce the TCO of a typical storage infrastructure, and achieve tier 1 performance and functionality at a tier 2 bprice point.

The XIV solution utilises a single virtualised pool eliminating design requirements and procedures for new capacities, enabling deployment of storage volumes in less than 60 seconds. Administrators need not concern themselves with RAID groups and LUN sizes as the layout of the data is all automatically managed by the XIV management system. The data is spread evenly across all storage nodes to provide consistent and balanced utilisation of the spindles.

The system is so easy to manage that no formal training is required, no tuning of the system ever takes place and no design decisions need to be made when adding new volumes. High utilisation is achieved because the full usable capacity is available from a single pool of 1TB SATA drives. The system’s architecture can then deliver a performance level similar to that of a controller based solution with 146GB FC drives.

Perhaps the most compelling feature of XIV is that there are no add-on licences; the base system delivers snapshots, mirroring, remote replication, migration tools, thin provisioning and management reports at no extra cost. This makes the cost of investing in the technology as predictable as its performance.

Highlights:

  • A revolutionary, high-end, disk storage system designed to eliminate the complexity of administration and management of tiered storage.
  • Fully virtualized grid architecture, supporting mission-critical workloads and innovatively designed to simplify storage in virtually every way
  • High reliability and data availability via active-active N+1 redundancy of all key components, partition mirroring, unique self-healing, rapid rebuild times, and non-disruptive upgrades
  • Unmatched total cost of ownership and environment-friendly attributes, with breakthrough ease of management, full system virtualization, and dramatic efficiencies in capacity, power, and space
  • Enterprise-level, consistent performance through massive parallelism, disk utilization, and unique caching mechanisms.
  • Open and integrated system, offering strong integration with the IBM portfolio and diverse interoperability with open system servers and technologies
  • Transparent, no-impact scalability, in on-demand increments, without the need for manual data migration or performance tuning, providing automatic online capacity growth
  • Rich, enterprise-class function set bundled with the system software including virtually unlimited, near-instant differential snapshots, thin provisioning, data migration, asynchronous and synchronous mirroring, as well as an intuitive management console

Contact us for more info . . .