The IBM XIV® Storage System Breakthrough

Next-generation enterprise-class storage at exceptionally low Total Cost of Ownership

The IBM XIV® Storage System is a revolutionary, easily managed, high-end, open disk system, designed to meet today’s ongoing herculean IT challenges. Its design — a grid of standard Intel®/Linux® components connected in any-to-any topology using Gigabit Ethernet — represents the next generation of high-end SAN (Storage Area Networks) systems. It is the industry’s first single-architecture storage system, providing the highest level of performance, reliability and features, along with management simplicity and exceptional TCO.

The XIV system scales non-disruptively from partial to full rack configurations (27 TB to 79 TB usable), meeting growing capacity needs on-demand. Its unique architectural design scales throughput proportionally along with capacity, giving the power boost needed to keep performance high.

The XIV system is a core component of IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure for a Smarter Planet and, within that, the Information Infrastructure offering, which helps today's businesses, including SMB, increase efficiency and reduce risk while addressing availability, security, compliance, and information retention.

IBM XIV system highlights include:

• Low TCO – High-end storage at dramatically lower costs, by tackling and lowering the impact of all cost factors: acquisition, environmentals, administration/management, downtime, and even backup and restore
• Ease of management – IBM XIV transforms and simplifies storage management through multiple design and software features, including:
• Full, built-in virtualization
• Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) support, providing simplified, centralized security control
• Powerful management tools: a highly intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), and a powerful CLI (command line interface) for complex scripting
• Event notification
• Host packages for setup and multipath support simplify host
• Per-host mapping support for XIV clusters, mapping private volumes per server to give exclusive access to a volume, such as for “boot from SAN”
• Reliability and availability – Supreme reliability and availability with a mere 40-minute or less rebuild time, enabled by near-instant self-healing and unique, grid-based, active-active with N+1 system redundancy; non-disruptive hot-swapping of hardware and firmware
• Performance – High, consistent performance and hotspot-free service due to mass parallelism and perfect load balancing, eliminating distribution planning
• Scalability – Non-disruptive incremental scaling from partial to full rack (27-79 TB usable); with every capacity increase, IBM XIV scales performance linearly and self-tunes automatically, ensuring high performance and fast access even as data grows
• Security – IBM XIV provides Tier-1 level support for the three “As” -- authentication, authorization, and auditing – and enterprise-level user management:
  • Centralized user control through LDAP support – Integrates with the organization’s enterprise user directory for authenticated access
  • Role-based management – Provides pre-defined roles, protecting information: Super Storage Administrator, Storage Administrator, Application Administrator, ReadOnly, and Technician
  • Auditing – Logs every command, providing an audit trail of all user activities and commands executed; logs are never deleted and can be sent to enterprise monitoring systems
  • Secure management connectivity – Uses SSL encryption to protect management communication, commands, and passwords
• Software features – IBM XIV provides built-in tier-1 features that make storage management ease and help use fewer terabytes to achieve the same goals:
  • Thin provisioning with instant space reclamation – Allows the real-time allocation of logical volume size as larger than physical capacity, and supporting applications to interlock with XIV so unused space can be detected instantly, returned to the general pool, and automatically reassigned for reuse
  • Snapshots – Near unlimited differential snapshots created instantly and with virtually no impact on performance
  • Data migration – IBM XIV acts as a host, gaining access to the volume on the legacy system and efficiently migrating volumes while preventing downtime
  • Remote mirroring – Full, flexible asynchronous and synchronous mirroring, ensuring availability of data and its protection at virtually unlimited distances between sites, in support of disaster recovery and remote backup solutions. XIV asynchronous mirroring can be automatic, based on a user-configurable schedule, manual, based on dedicated commands, or both. 
• Software interoperability – Connects to host software and other storage products via FC and iSCSI ports on the XIV data modules that contain interface connectivity, and provides kits for easy host configuration and management:
• Host connectivity – Common host attachment framework kits for Microsoft® Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX
• Centralized native multipath software management – Supporting host-based concurrent multipath I/O, with performance, bandwidth, and other benefits
• Integrates with diverse storage products, including:
• IBM platforms – Linux, Power VM for IBM POWER systems with System I, System P and Linux over POWER clients, IBM AIX (including native AIX MPIO driver with performance improvement)
• Tivoli Storage Management (TSM) solutions – Tivoli Productivity Center (TPC), TSM Copy Services and Advanced Copy Services, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager
• Other – GPFS on AIX, PowerHA (known as HACMP), Scale Out File System, Storage Foundation for Windows, Symantec VCS, VMWare, VSS Provider, Windows cluster
• Single-architecture storage – A revolutionary approach of one system for all storage needs, greatly simplifying storage management

Information on the IBM XIV Storage System is also available on www.ibm.com.