Low Total Cost of Ownership
XIV Savings
IBM XIV delivers exceptionally low TCO by tackling head-on all the cost factors that contribute to an enterprise-class storage system’s overall cost (for fuller details, see the white paper: “Optimizing Enterprise Storage TCO with IBM XIV”).
Acquisition savings:- Single-tier architecture. Supports all kinds of storage in one environment and makes scaling easy
- Commodity hardware. Use of off-the-shelf components makes customized hardware unnecessary and makes it possible to integrate newer, state-of-the-art hardware as soon as it becomes available and without delay
- Lower hardware costs. Innovative use of highly economical disk drives [Very High Density Slower Rotation (VHDSR) drives] offers excellent capacity-for-cost value while meeting enterprise performance standards
- Just in time purchasing. Built-in thin-provisioning allows the acquisition and installation of additional capacity to be delayed until needed, making it possible to defer capital purchases and take full advantage of future hardware and price-point improvements not currently available. Easy, single-platform scaling, with performance self-tuning, makes as you go capacity growth viable and cost-effective
- Optimal capacity use. Automatic and perfect load-balancing, self-healing capability, and other architectural features provide tier-1 enterprise-level performance while using fewer disk drives and, ultimately, much less capacity than traditional architectures
- All software included. Simple pricing includes all features, making purchasing simple and eliminating software licensing fees. There are no software licensing fees, neither upon initial purchase, nor over time when capacity is added
The XIV system efficiently answers the same storage needs with less consumption of power and cooling, and with a greatly minimized space footprint, resulting in greatly reduced operational costs. Its "more with less" capability derives from several factors:
- Application of highly effective, enterprise-class Very High Density Slower Rotating (VHDSR) drive technology
- Optimized use of disk capacity, with no orphaned space whatsoever and use of differential snapshots, which economize on disk space
- Powerful thin provisioning with automated space reclamation, providing the ability to super-extend logical capacity while requiring physical capacity to be only large enough for the actually written data. IBM XIV also automatically releases “zeroed out space,” easily marked as such by administrators, back into the general pool, enabling its reuse.
The management effort required to configure and monitor the XIV system is by order of magnitude less than for comparable systems, for several reasons:
- Fast deployment. No planning of volume layout is required, as the system automatically lays out volumes on disks and modules
- Self-tuning. No need to monitor performance levels and migrate volumes between modules to increase performance; no need to use volume managers for performance-enhancing techniques such as representing many small volumes as a single large volume
- Simplified storage management. Powerful and simple user environment enables system management with practically no learning curve
- Less hardware to fail
- Integral UPS
- Less human intervention
- Easy to monitor
- Rapid self-healing and scrubbing
- All components redundant
- Free and flexible volume replication
- Snaps with no performance impact
- Differential snaps, reducing storage consumption over traditional full copies
- VSS support
- Simple migration
- Consistency groups
The XIV system is the first storage system to have a single architecture, answering all storage needs. A "single architecture" offers a simpler and more effective storage infrastructure, and saves on costs:
- Fewer system types to support simplifies data center operations by reducing complexity and, consequently, administrative efforts and related manpower costs
- Eliminates any need to migrate between storage tiers as data becomes outdated or demands change, further reducing efforts
XIV's scalable architecture supports the independent growth of each key aspect of the system, including capacity, interfaces, and cache, all within the same architecture. The bottom line is a system that is truly scalable in both capacity and performance:
- There is never a need for upfront investment to be prepared for future demands, and never a problem of writing off existing equipment when current demands change and a new architecture is required.
- XIV partial rack configurations enable customers to cost-affordably easily step into excellent enterprise storage and scale up, using only the absolutely necessary capacity — and power and space! — every step of the way.
