High Density Drives for High-End Storage

The XIV system leverages the revolutionary technology of enterprise-class Very High Density Slower Rotational (VHDSR) disks, providing an enterprise storage system that features huge capacities, high density, and low power consumption — and at reduced TCO and outstanding performance levels.

The key factor in the dramatic increase in capacity density is "perpendicular recording" — a new technology that revolutionizes how bits are encoded on magnetic media. This technology has already reached the amazing density of 1 TB per disk drive and promises much more.

Traditional storage architecture is unable to handle well this quantum leap in disk capacity. Using standard mirroring or RAID-5 protection schemes leads to huge rebuild times. Another problem of traditional architecture is that the relatively slow rotational speed of VHDSR drives (7200 RPM, rather than 10K and 15K RPM) causes major performance problems.

The XIV system provides the highest levels of performance and reliability based on large VHDSR drives, achieving this feat by employing a unique architecture, mass parallelism and a special caching scheme. Using the XIV system, IT teams can actually improve performance while saving on power, cooling, and space and, as such, meet their budgetary and “green” objectives.

Specifically, the XIV system uses 7200 RPM VHDSR drives with vertical recording, out-performing systems based on 15K RPM FC drives.