Regarding the rebuilding time, I’ve encountered a case where an EVA with 80*73GB drives could be rebuilt in 30min, believe it or not. But actually it was just a trick - a rebuilding time only matters when you know how many data there is and what’s the workload.

one comment on pricing:
while in every it business prices go rapidly down,i think storage is still astonishingly expensive (i.e. TOO expensive), especially when you want to scale and want things like mirroring and that stuff.

so, compare the pricing of a single TB disk to the pricing for the same TB provided by a nas or san storage system. it`s typically one or two orders of magnitude above that and this simply sucks. even pricing for software-only solutions like datacore simply sucks.

think we need some revolution in the storage business. thin provisioning, dedupe, mirroring, snapshots - that needs to go mainstream.

look at the new features of zfs and port zfs to linux. that would induce some movement into the fossilized enterprise storage market…..

I am seeing a lot of comments here from various competitors to XIV, leading the conversation to where they think it will benefit themselve, instead of talking about what is best for the customers.

I have been a server, storage, and SAN admin/customer for most of my career. I have also architected solutions using a lot of your different vendor’s products, in the past. Let’s discuss some of the things customers really want, and what I asked for year after year. XIV seems to have addressed all of my wants when relation to storage. Now, if it could get my son to mow the lawn on time, it might be the perfect piece of equipment in the world.
1. zero downtime - either planned or unplanned. I have spent many a night migrating data from one storage platforn to another. The least disruptive to my users was usually host based migrations, which happened to be the most disruptive to my sleep and personal life. Yes, there is an outage to move to XIV, if using their migration tool, but their future direction is by far the best I have seen. Yeah, almost every vendor says 5 nines availability, but that only covers unplanned outages. To me the planned outages were more troublesome, since getting downtime sometimes required an act of congress to get all my end users to agree to when an outage oculd happen.
2. Reliability - From what I have seen and heard, this box is extremely reliable. The box is designed to account for component failures, and also readjusts itself to perform optimally. If I lost a drive or DAE on another platform, performance generally degraded for some time, or data was lost (yes, it may have been due to the way I laid out my raid groups, but with XIV you don’t have to worry about that).
3. Performance - From talking to XIV customers, it seems that they are getting equal or better performance than their previous solutions. It is very hard to tell these customers that they don’t know what they are talking about, since they are actually running real world apps. Yes, an imaginary workload could overrun an XIV, but that is true for every storage frame. Oh yeah, I used to be a programmer too, and I could write code that could cripple any storage frame, or make any frame look good. This is why I am not a fan of benchmarks. I would rather see a real app at work. Every company has to weigh the cost of changing code, to buying extra HW/SW. XIV seems to be very forgiving to the odd bad code. If you can’t change your code and it doesn’t work on XIV, then sure buy something else. My bet is that you will spend a lot more money though.
4. Ease of management - I have worked on a large variety of storage systems, and XIV is by far the easiest one I have ever worked on. Also, I don’t need to take months of training classes, to make sure I am setting it up correctly. It took me less than a day to be proficient. After many years of looking at heat graphs and spreadsheets, to make sure I laid out my data correctly, XIV would have saved my a tremendous amount of time. I am sure I would have a lot fewer grey hairs, had it come out a decade earlier!

ILM is something I have had to do for years. This to me is only because XIV didn’t exist at the time. Spending hours/days/weeks to guess what tier to put my data on, is a ridiculous concept, if you don’t need to do it. Yes, it is a guess. Every company will try to convince you that it is a science, by looking at stats and talking to app teams and DBAs to gather information, but it really is a guessing game. Every person that comes in contact with data, has a different opinion on how important it is, and how frequently it is going to be accessed. Also, over time that data changes its access patterns, which makes your layout obsolete. Don’t get me wrong here, there is still a need to use ILM when talking about archiving, but at the Tier 1 through Tier 3, range, XIV has removed that need. Someone once told me that ILM means “I like money to the vendors, and I’m losing money to the customers”. This is sad but true, but there really was no other option but to play the ILM, until XIV came out. Solution Architects have made a lot of money from going into customer sites, to try to save them money by tiering. Trust me, I was one of them. I would rather spend my time on other tasks now!

All the conversations about milliseconds, really dosn’t matter, if companies put their data on XIV and they are happy with the way it works! I am sure there is an app or two out there, where XIV doesn’t work, but they only account for a small part of the upper end storage market. With IBM investing in more R&D, I am sure that number is going to continue to dwindle. If you really have a storage frame that requires extremely high I/O, then talk to IBM about a trial. I am sure they will work with you, and if XIV doesn’t meet your needs, they have other platforms that might. More than likely, you will not need to look further.

Sorry for the long winded comments, but I thought I needed to voice them.

A couple of questions remain however that still are leaving me apprehensive:

1) With all of the processing and SATA drives in a single rack, the heat output must be tremendous. How many BTU does the full rack XIV put out?

2) I understand that upon a drive failure, the drive is not necessarily “rebuilt” but “redistributed” among the box in 30 minutes. When replacing the failed drive, how long does it take to rebuild the physical new drive?

3) IBM is great about posting performance numbers for their products on Storage Performance Council. When can we expect XIV numbers to be posted?

I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of this along with the half rack model!

I have been involved in an XIV deal. When the customer got the boxes installed was chuffed to bits with ease of use and the performance (and before you ask they where not a mid teir usage customer!!)

Summary - chill out and give it a go!

Dave

http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/33-types-of-costs-for-storage-tco.pdf