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) and meets 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.

The IBM XIV Storage System stands apart, architected in its entirety to provide high reliability and performance at strikingly low total cost of ownership. Its ability to offer low TCO is the outcome of several inherent characteristics:

A fully virtualized, self-managed, self-healing system that balances load perfectly at all times, optimizing capacity use and minimizing human intervention and error
Provided with a built-in features set, including differential snapshots, remote mirroring, and thin provisioning
Easily managed through a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that minimizes storage management overhead
Built entirely of standard components, including low-cost, very high density slower rotation disks (VHDSR)
Enables non-disruptive changes to hardware and firmware, without affecting performance and without need for downtime
Full hardware redundancy lowers risk of failure to negligible levels

A single-tier platform based on a grid architecture, for easy scaling
The unique combination of the above built-in characteristics enables the IBM XIV Storage System to provide a huge TCO advantage in comparison with other enterprise storage systems.

Performance
Performance Reinvented!

One of the major requirements of IT teams today is providing users and applications with adequate performance levels. This task is growing increasingly difficult as demand for high performance grows, extracting performance from current systems becomes more complex, and budgets for storage systems and administrative resources diminish.

The XIV system provides an outstanding solution to today's performance requirements by several means:
Mass parallelism - The system exploits all system components to the fullest while perfectly balancing load between all disks and modules
Innovative cache architecture - The system's innovative distributed cache architecture directly leads to improved cache performance
CPU power - The system equips each data module with its own processing power, supplying enormous CPU for complex caching and snapshot management. IBM XIV also provides dual processors in its data modules that contain interface connectivity, adding up to 30% increase in performance, depending on workloads.
Consistent performance - The system maintains high performance even during failure of any component
High performance with snapshots - The system maintains consistent high performance during differential snapshots and other snapshot activities

Data migration can be used to migrate volumes from legacy systems to the IBM XIV Storage System with practically no downtime.
One of the obstacles in migrating volumes from legacy systems to new systems is the long application downtime while the volumes are being copied to the new system. IBM XIV offers a powerful data migration feature that migrates volumes while preventing downtime.
Data migration to the XIV system takes place as follows:
The XIV system acts as a host, gaining access to the volume on the legacy system
The XIV system is configured as a proxy, as follows:
Accept an I/O request from a host
Generate an I/O request to the legacy system that reflects the host's I/O request
Get the response from the legacy system
Respond to the host based on the response received from the legacy system
While acting as a proxy, the system performs a background copy of all the data from the legacy system to the XIV system
The innovative data migration feature allows the migration of volumes from legacy systems to the XIV system with practically no downtime, performing copying of the information while applications are in production.