A revolutionary high-end disk storage architecture designed to eliminate the complexity of administration and management of tiered storage and information lifecycle management (ILM)

• Near-instantaneous and highly space-efficient snapshots provide point-in-time copies of data, which consume storage capacity only per changes while maintaining high performance
• System virtualisation that greatly simplifies IT operations and optimises performance through automatic distribution of data across system resources, avoiding hot spots without manual tuning
• High reliability achieved through unique self-healing functionality, which can enable the system to rebuild a 1 TeraByte (TB) disk drive within 30 minutes or less, with almost no performance impact
• Optimised, consistent performance derived from the system's massive parallelism, disk utilisation and unique caching algorithms
• Amazingly intuitive user interface and system virtualisation greatly simplify storage configuration and management
• Built-in thin provisioning that can help reduce direct and indirect costs by allowing users to install capacity only for data actually written and gradually grow it over time with minimal management effort
• Greener power usage enabled through the use of large capacity Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) drives and optimised use of disk capacity, resulting in outstanding power consumption efficiency per TB, without compromising performance
• Customer-centric, low point of entry (27 TB usable) with incremental scaling (in 6 TB increments) to full rack capacity (79 TB usable), enabling organisations to start small based on current needs and flexibly add capacity - and linearly increase performance, thanks to the presence of cache, central processing unit (CPU) and connectivity in every module - while in production and with no need to reconfigure.

A grid-based storage system of independent modules

The XIV Storage System is a next-generation high-end open disk storage system. Part of IBM's broad spectrum of system storage and Storage Area Network (SAN) offerings, the XIV Storage System is an innovative, enterprise disk system based on a grid of standard, off-the-shelf hardware components. The XIV system employs a storage architecture designed to provide the highest levels of performance, reliability and functionality combined with unprecedented ease of management and exceptionally low total cost of ownership (TCO).

The XIV Storage System is designed to deliver consistently high performance through the elimination of hot spots and the full exploitation of system resources. Its ground-breaking architecture provides optimised performance, scalability and ease of management while harnessing the high capacity and cost benefits of SATA drives.

Outstanding availability and reliability are delivered through a revolutionary redundancy scheme, enabling automated self healing with exceptionally fast rebuild times. Additionally, software functionality including snapshot capability, thin provisioning and remote mirroring can help to ease provisioning and protect business data from unexpected outages. The XIV Storage System can help customers deploy an information infrastructure that is reliable, versatile and available while offering improvements in storage management, provisioning and improved asset utilisation.