Built-in Virtualization

The IBM XIV system is fully virtualized, freeing the user from planning how logical volumes are spread over physical disks. The system assigns physical resources automatically, ensuring optimal resource utilization.

The IBM XIV system transparently handles:

• Allocating of new volumes: When a new volume is allocated, space for the volume is distributed evenly on all disks, and throughout all modules, without any user intervention. This frees the storage administrator from any planning tasks, while ensuring perfect load balancing on all system disks and modules.
• Resizing of volumes: Resizing a volume is possible at any time, without limitation. As with new volumes, the resized part of the volume is distributed over all disks and modules, without any user planning.
• Adding of more capacity: When new capacity is added to the system, the proportional part of the existing data is migrated to the new capacity, ensuring perfect load balancing. The XIV system performs this operation without any user intervention. The user sees only an increase in the amount of free capacity, without association to a specific module or disk.

This virtualization within the system provides optimal performance, while freeing the storage administrator from several tasks:

• Planning the layout of volumes over disks and modules
• Monitoring performance levels and migrating volumes between modules
• Splitting large volumes into multiple small volumes via a volume manager to enhance performance

The net result is a system that remains perfectly balanced throughout changes in capacity, configuration, or application behavior – and with no management overhead.