IBM Systems and Technology IBM System Storage White Paper
Blue skies for your cloud with IBM XIV storage
Executive summary Table of Contents Clouds are all the rage these days and, fortunately, the solution has matured beyond the typical hype. According to the insights of analyst 1 Executive summary Gartner, the industry has turned a corner: “Most enterprises have some 2 Cloud computing for protected experience with cloud computing and are looking at how to continue shared resources using cloud.”1 In other words, they have progressed beyond the “wait and see” strategy indicative of early-stage adoption. 4 Why XIV storage is an excellent fit for compute cloud environments The benefits of cloud computing are increasingly proving themselves in 14 Conclusion: Delivering on the deployments in just about every sector. IDC has found abundant promise of cloud computing compelling reasons why organizations are adopting cloud solutions. 15 About the IBM XIV Storage System The top objectives include: reducing cost through data center environments (hardware and software purchasing, staff head count, and 15 For more information pay-for-use consumption models to increase utilization), increasing revenue by deploying and scaling applications faster to meet business demands, and the ability and agility to respond quickly to changing needs.2
This white paper focuses on storage as an essential cornerstone to private and hosted compute cloud environments and proposes the key elements to successful implementation. It describes the IBM® XIV® Storage System as a highly strategic general purpose storage solution for distributed enterprise private and hosted compute cloud environments, as well as an essential component of the IBM cloud portfolio.
This paper also highlights, through documented customer cloud stories, how XIV storage lends itself to easy creation of a well-balanced cloud ecosystem and how its proven attributes of powerful virtualization, performance, reliability and elasticity, and advanced features, including implementation of IBM Hyper-Scale technologies— namely, IBM Hyper-Scale Mobility and IBM Hyper-Scale Manager— help in accelerating implementations and meeting tenant service-level and other business goals while minimizing costs and management overhead. Cloud computing for protected • Achieve economies of scale through resource consolidation shared resources • Enable end-user self service • Scale workloads quickly and smoothly without complex The definition of cloud computing, which differs across the IT overhead or costly development industry, has been finely tuned by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology as follows: The bright forecast is cloud Reports indicate that 84 percent of cloud users are “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, experiencing reduced costs when moving applications to the convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of cloud. With such compelling advantages, small wonder that configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, CDW predicts that 34 percent of company IT budgets will be storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly allocated to cloud services by 2015.3 provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” In describing the future outlook of cloud computing, IDC Key compute cloud objectives states, “The future is optimistic for all types of cloud deployments in the next two to five years. The optimism is Why a cloud? Organizations have several objectives when fueled by the strategic shift away from deployments of driven to implement a private cloud or purchase cloud services, conventional IT to cloud.”4 among them: Cloud models for delivering ready resources • Accelerate the realization of results and gain immediate access The broad range of cloud demands has driven industry to resources using implementation-ready delivery models services. As outlined in the diagram below, compute cloud • Enable re-focus on the core business by offloading specific IT offers IT as a service, including processing, storage, and other overhead resources, while ubiquitous data access has driven the storage • Reduce the risk inherent in large-scale IT management cloud model for standalone storage as a service.
Storage Compute Cloud Cloud Storage as a Service IT as a Service
Private Clouds Hybrid Public Clouds
Improve speed and dexterity Create new business value
Figure 1: Cloud model for improving agility and creating new business value.
2 To meet rapidly changing customer requirements, enterprises Storage requirements for the cloud may use a combination of cloud-storage consumption models Any cloud, regardless of its intended use, has the same based on their needs: private clouds, public clouds, or a hybrid requirements of the storage infrastructure—derived from the of the two. previously cited definition of cloud computing—namely:
Seeding the cloud: Storage • Consistent high performance Storage is a key component in any cloud-computing • Effective resource sharing foundation – and not just any storage, but virtualized storage • Optimized interoperability with virtualized servers and storage capable of integrating effectively with • Simple, rapid provisioning virtual-server technologies. A recent article in • Simple, automated management InformationWeek states, “IT departments that do not • High elasticity for transparent scaling and service to enthusiastically embrace storage virtualization are essentially on-demand requests 5 wasting money.” • High availability and robust data protection to help promote business continuity Storage plays a role in a complete cloud solution by serving • Comprehensive reporting and flexible integration with billing specific purposes: and chargeback systems
• General purpose storage: Multi-purpose on-line data storage for day-to-day or periodic use • Archive and records management: Available and recoverable long-term immutable data retention supporting compliance and litigation • Data protection: Data replication, backup and restore for business and data continuity
3 Why XIV storage is an excellent fit for compute cloud environments The IBM XIV Storage System is a high-end general-purpose distributed disk storage system with a number of primary features that make it an ideal match for cloud delivery models:
• Cloud agile: Enables rapid deployment of cloud environments, adapting easily to constantly changing requirements • Self-optimizing: Continuously in-balance, tuning-free, self-healing architecture with consistently high performance • Efficient by design: Energy efficiency and capacity optimization with proven ease of use
The revolutionary XIV system, with its massively paralleled grid architecture, allocates system resources evenly at all times and scales performance with capacity, transparently providing the elasticity so critical to cloud infrastructures. Scaling is seamless, without the need for complex, time-consuming tuning, provisioning or configuration.
Implementation of IBM Hyper-Scale enables the XIV system to provide exceptionally scalable storage management for the enterprise data center, facilitating cloud deployments by offering extreme flexibility for addressing dynamic business requirements combined with powerful, low-touch management.
The XIV system offers highly affordable storage suitable for even the most demanding and highly fluctuating workloads, providing Tier 1 benefits, such as consistent high performance and high reliability at low total cost of ownership. Figure 2: IBM XIV Gen3 Storage System.
4 Providing exceptional levels of integration with cloud platform Optional performance acceleration technologies, such as OpenStack, VMware, Microsoft For an extra performance edge, XIV customers can choose an Hyper-V and IBM PowerVM® server virtualization solutions additional hardware option. While many storage systems and IBM Tivoli® products, XIV storage offers outstanding exploit solid-state drives (SSD) as static tiers for only the most agility for accommodating growth. critical data, XIV uses SSDs for caching across all volumes.
The XIV system sets a new standard for ease of use with The strategic XIV architecture with SSD caching endows benchmark enterprise storage manageability, including the performance benefits to all applications—without tiers to automation of most tasks and a highly intuitive user interface manage. Using commodity SSD drives, XIV delivers a huge that is customer-acclaimed for its simplicity and scales, as amount of caching memory to read-cache, the system’s most mentioned, across multiple XIV systems in the data center to frequently accessed data, dynamically and adaptively. consolidate and simplify management of cloud deployments. Tests prove that this design boosts application performance by Effective resource sharing up to 4.5 times for database-like workloads at a fraction of Predictable high performance with heterogeneous workloads typical SSD storage costs.6 In contrast, all-flash storage systems Storage in the cloud is shared between diverse systems, may provide the desired high performance levels, yet come supporting numerous tenants—each unaware of the others. with an extremely expensive price tag. Cloud providers must comply with each customer’s service level agreement (SLA) for performance, uptime and other iSCSI speed no longer reserved just for premium standards—regardless of service-level commitments to other performance tenants. For IP SAN environments, XIV boosts system iSCSI throughput by up to five times via 10 Gigabit Ethernet XIV storage provides consistent and predictable performance (10GbE) connectivity, which delivers cost-effective, high for heterogeneous workloads that allows the sharing of storage performance storage.7 resources without impact across users. The XIV system supports a wide range of simultaneous workload needs, from Inherent load balancing of all system resources (such as CPU, capacity-hungry to ultra-high performance. These features cache and disk) gives the XIV system a powerful ability to meet translate into more effective resource consolidation and diverse SLAs, even as workloads fluctuate in the dynamic cloud reliable scalability. environment and evolve over time.
5 Quality of Service (QoS) Virtualization for demanding dynamic environments A major challenge for cloud providers is to share a huge pool The cloud computing resource-sharing model uses large pools of resources on demand according to each contracted service of virtual servers and storage, requiring tight integration level while preventing the heavy loads of some customers from between servers and storage. affecting others. IBM XIV storage supports numerous hypervisors, including The XIV Quality of Service feature places bandwidth limits on VMware, IBM PowerVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. With each storage volume to ensure that extreme loads on some its inherent design and certified VMware and Hyper-V volumes do not starve or degrade performance for others. interoperability, XIV storage is the ideal storage-architecture Enabling total customer control over QoS parameters, XIV complement to these platforms. storage simultaneously supports multiple lines of service, promoting effective and efficient managed services for storage. Storage architecture for agile virtualization All too often organizations deploying server virtualization Motionless tiering for RAID-free virtual prioritization don’t take into account the storage that underlies their virtual With traditional storage tiering technologies, not only do IT systems. The resulting challenges quickly become evident high-performance disk systems require expensive outlays, they in the form of unevenly distributed workloads, performance also demand precious processing power, overhead and time to degradation and compromised reliability. physically move data to the appropriate tier. The XIV architecture inherently lends itself to optimizing The groundbreaking IBM XIV architecture enables Tier 1 server-storage environments. Native XIV features, detailed storage performance using nearline SAS disk drives. To below, bring powerful performance, consolidation and manage the priority of specific data volumes, the XIV system scalability value to the dynamic system environments that provides “motionless” storage tiering—highly efficient virtual virtualization typically demands. storage prioritization without the need to copy or move data. Robust XIV storage integration with VMware In addition, upgraded quality of service and lowered priority The XIV Storage System provides best-in-class virtual storage are effective immediately, obviating the need for financial architecture for virtual servers. The combination of its optimal outlays and bulk data movement, and eliminating performance resource use and hotspot-free server-storage performance impact. makes for exceptional synergy with the VMware server infrastructure and products.
6 Inherently promoting optimized server-storage environments, XIV storage: Proven Hyper-V cloud integration the XIV architecture leverages the range of interoperability The XIV Storage System is a foundation of IBM’s contribution features provided by VMware, delivering the following features to the Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track Program, a joint for cloud virtualization: effort between Microsoft and its OEM partners to help organizations accelerate the development and implementation • Storage capability transparency to support policy-based of private clouds. storage deployment—via a provider for vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) This program provides a proven, end-to-end, ready cloud • The ability for VMware administrators to manage and solution based on Microsoft Hyper-V server virtualization, provision storage through a VMware vCenter plug-in, with IBM XIV virtualized storage and other essential technologies. controlled storage delegation This modular, extensible and flexible format can help optimize • Improved VMware performance and scalability with vStorage value, to ease deployment as well as administration, support API for Array Integration (VAAI) hardware support and expansion. • Automated storage replication and failover functionality via the XIV Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site The integration, provisioning and management are performed Recovery Manager (SRM) centrally by Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine • High-powered data protection with stellar performance, and Manager 2012 (SCVMM). This integration also enables simplified management by integrating with the VMware data customers to tap into the latest features of Microsoft Hyper-V, protection framework—vStorage APIs for Data Protection VSS, and MSCS (VADP)—with IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager (purchased separately). Instantaneous copying for ready-to-use storage To keep up with dynamic cloud demands, the cloud In order to balance workloads across multiple storage systems, environment needs to enable the provisioning of fully administrators can use VMware Storage vMotion to manually functional virtual machines in a very short timeframe. The move virtual disks non-disruptively from one physical XIV virtual machine must include the operating system and Storage System to another. business applications installed and ready to go.
XIV Volume Copy instantaneously creates a full volume replica. By cloning a template volume previously installed, XIV storage enables immediate provisioning of virtual machines and applications.
7 Minimal management to save time and effort Rapid storage provisioning and decommissioning In-balance virtualized capacity with no tuning required Due to its dynamic nature, the cloud environment should Resource virtualization promotes cloud objectives of achieving enable simple, rapid self-service provisioning and a low-touch system that maintains and manages itself while decommissioning of virtual servers and their associated storage maximizing resource utilization. volumes.
In platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service For most storage systems, the tasks of provisioning new LUNs, (IaaS) cloud models, the cloud provider typically does not have adding them to host clusters and decommissioning resources visibility into the specific usage of the storage or business are relatively complicated, non-automated and application. Therefore, the provider cannot tune storage for time-consuming, and performed by trained technicians. This specific application needs, fluctuations in demand, or other approach often does not keep pace with the dynamic demands, variables, which can cause suboptimal application performance. minimal intervention and maximized economies of scale required with cloud management. The autonomic XIV Storage System is always optimally tuned by design; it automatically maintains optimal performance with The XIV Storage System can provision and decommission no tuning or management throughout an application’s lifetime, storage almost instantly with no configuration effort, making regardless of workload growth or fluctuation. storage immediately available to new and existing virtual machines in the cloud, while automatically ensuring the optimal storage array load balance.
Figure 3: IBM XIV storage provides effortless provisioning with GUI-based volume creation.
8 With this immediate resource availability, organizations can The XIV grid architecture is designed to handle rapidly cut their implementation times and maximize resource evolving environments, retaining great performance and using utilization, achieving results more quickly and preventing storage capacity efficiently, and helping maximize effective unnecessary additional storage investments. resource usage.
Thin allocation for conservative capital outlays Cloud product integration for maximum functionality and Disk storage supports multiple concurrent cloud consumers. In efficiency many cases, customers request or reserve more disk space than IBM XIV storage is a keystone in the comprehensive private actually needed. Supplying the capacity requested by each cloud portfolio by IBM, which includes: tenant—with breathing room—can require a major investment Hardware in storage hardware that will never, in fact, be utilized. • IBM Power Systems™ and IBM System x® servers: In this case, thin storage allocation can prevent major over- Enterprise servers and software investment in storage, helping keep storage acquisition in line • IBM XIV Storage System: High-end disk storage with with actual usage. exception performance, TCO and ease of use • IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC): Simplified and The XIV Storage System inherently allocates data “thinly,” centralized storage infrastructure management using physical capacity only when the data is actually written. • IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS): This ensures that space allocation facilitates rather than Scale-out storage featuring IBM Active Cloud Engine file hinders system elasticity. management • IBM ProtecTIER®: Data deduplication The XIV system also offers built-in thin provisioning, which • IBM backup and recovery systems cloud providers can leverage to create and provision virtual Software volumes that are larger than the actual physical storage to • IBM PowerVM: Robust server virtualization fulfill the demands of all cloud users. • IBM Tivoli storage software family: Tivoli Storage Automatic reconfiguration that preserves performance Manager, Tivoli Storage FlashCopy® Manager, Tivoli and capacity utilization Storage Productivity Center and Tivoli Usage and In traditional storage systems, frequent configuration changes Accounting Manager often have negative side effects—reducing performance and • IBM SmartCloud® Storage family: SmartCloud wasting capacity. Provisioning, SmartCloud Monitoring, and SmartCloud Access8
9 XIV further supports cloud deployments through integration with cloud management frameworks such as the OpenStack niu scales cloud to new heights with XIV Grizzly API and VMware vCloud in addition to the above- Managed IT services provider niu Solutions deployed the mentioned IBM cloud management tools. In OpenStack IBM XIV Storage System, increasing storage performance by a environments, which use the iSCSI protocol, XIV delivers factor of up to four and enabling higher availability for its high performance through high-bandwidth 10GbE customers. The company runs 10 XIV systems with one connectivity. part-time FTE. Elasticity for maximum agility – and management Phil Clark, Channel Director at niu Solutions states: “XIV is Scalability in capacity and performance ideal for enabling cloud services. We use all of the tools within Typical cloud requirements dictate that storage has the ability the XIV to support cloud strategies, from virtualization and to scale dynamically up and down according to user demands. automation to thin provisioning. The XIV is designed to be However, downward elasticity is less common since most very elastic, so we can add capacity quickly and scale up easily. organizations continually add data while purging very little. This allows us to give clients truly on-demand access to the services they need.” Read the case study at: On the chance that one tenant frees up capacity, it will, most https://ibm.biz/BdxLDz, and see the video at: likely, be swallowed up by other demand for more storage. In https://ibm.biz/BdxLDq. most cases, when more capacity is needed, scaling up by deploying additional hardware on the storage network is only Benefits: part of the solution; a major issue with expanding storage is • Generates superior revenue-to-rack-footprint value. reconfiguring it to make the capacity usable. • Delivers performance improvements of up to four times and ensures high availability of customer data. The modular XIV architecture simplifies capacity expansion by • Offers excellent ease-of-management: less than half of one enabling the non-disruptive addition of storage modules into FTE is required to manage 700 TB of storage. the system grid. Newly added capacity is not only immediately • Boosts competitive edge: TCO savings translate into lower and fully usable, the system automatically redistributes data prices for customers, helping niu to capture more of the among all modules to optimize utilization. market. • Enables Tier 1 hosted storage to be offered at a very Performance that scales along with capacity competitive price. Capacity elasticity alone is not sufficient to satisfy cloud computing requirements. Storage for clouds must also offer consistent I/O performance as capacity grows or shrinks; if not, cloud customers will not receive their contracted service quality level.
Since every XIV module contains the computing power and necessary cache to support its capacity, the system maintains its high and consistent performance as it scales up. The XIV Storage System is scalable in all key elements, including disk capacity, interfaces, cache and CPU power, enabling system performance to grow proportionally with capacity. This dependable scalability in resources makes the IBM XIV system low-risk storage for meeting service commitments.
10 Steadfast performance during virtual machine growth In virtualized cloud environments, as the number of virtual Technische Universität München enables machines per host increases, storage access increases. In cloud-ready SAP business conventional storage solutions, an increase in storage access The University implemented a fully cloud-enabled typically results in degraded system performance. infrastructure based on the IBM Power Systems platform that automates many administration tasks and greatly accelerates The XIV Storage System is fully and automatically distributed, preparation for the new semester. The virtualization solution with random I/O optimized, advanced caching algorithms and allows for a fast and flexible deployment of new SAP systems optimal I/O levels. The system architecture dramatically and software on IBM POWER7® and Intel processor-based reduces random seek times—offering granular and efficient systems accessing IBM XIV Storage System. Read the case caching that results in powerful performance at all times. study at: https://ibm.biz/BdxLFF.
Hotspot-free load balancing Benefits: The XIV Storage System is inherently load-balanced at all • TU München can provision a new server in 30 minutes (a times, actively distributing data and processing evenly across 90 percent reduction) and provision a new SAP instance in all spindles, providing hotspot-free storage that requires no less than half a day. tuning. • Data was migrated to the XIV storage systems, resulting in balanced performance and capacity utilization as well as Simple, centralized and consolidated management with IBM Hyper-Scale simplified management. The highly intuitive XIV graphical user interface (GUI) and • The University replaced 150 Sun servers with two IBM built-in management tools make administrative tasks easy and Power® servers and two IBM BladeCenter® systems, cutting efficient, with little training or expertise required, from 13 full racks to four half-racks, a savings of 85 percent, and cut provisioning volumes to monitoring systems. Cloud energy usage by around 80 percent. environments can expand to numerous XIV systems. • Migration to IBM DB2® resulted in a database size of 63 GB, a 40 percent reduction. To support this level of enterprise scalability, XIV storage implements IBM Hyper-Scale Manager, scaling the acclaimed XIV GUI across multiple XIV systems to enable centralized, consolidated administration of XIV systems across the enterprise—driving down cloud operational complexity and simplifying capacity management.
The ability to centrally manage local or distributed XIV systems and group systems by geography or other parameters promotes flexible, efficient management, such as control over primary and disaster recovery sites.
The exceptional flexibility of the XIV Storage System extends to mobile devices and tablets with the XIV Mobile Dashboard, empowering IT workers with on-the-go performance monitoring from iOS and Android devices.
11 Data protection and business continuity To help ensure system availability during routine maintenance Typical cloud SLAs dictate that cloud services and and hardware failures, the XIV Storage System provides: infrastructure are always available, with no service disruption. Traditional storage systems, which aggregate disks into RAID • Non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance—with all hardware groups, can risk hours to days of data-recovery delays and days and software maintenance performed while applications are to return to contractual performance levels following a running hardware or disk failure. • Self-healing through hardware redundancy and distributed data redundancy—without human intervention—for rapid The XIV cloud solution minimizes downtime and promotes recovery with minimal performance impact rapid return to operations—perhaps the fastest in its class— • Benchmark-speed disk rebuilds in the case of a hardware which dramatically reduces impact on ongoing operations and failure. promotes contract compliance, helping avert major risk in the event of hardware failure or disaster. Data protection and recovery to ensure business continuity Since protecting data from loss and corruption is a Even during a disk rebuild, performance impact is negligible fundamental cloud requirement for storage, cloud because all XIV disks participate in the rebuild simultaneously, infrastructures must include snapshots, mirroring and backups, effectively distributing the processing throughout the system. as well as rapid recovery.
Continuous availability, and non-disruptive upgrades The XIV system is designed for business continuity, and maintenance eliminating unplanned downtime and accelerating return to Unplanned outages can typically impact a larger population of operations from disasters large and small. Incorporating tenants in cloud environments than in traditional hardware, software and data considerations, the XIV infrastructures. Planned cloud downtime also presents major architecture delivers: problems since it is nearly impossible to coordinate with many unrelated tenants that have different system needs. Therefore, • Best-in-class, space-saving, minimal-impact differential highly available storage systems must support self-healing, hot snapshots with service level agreement granularity upgrades and on-line maintenance. • Synchronous data replication for total data currency • Asynchronous data replication for long-distance replication that strikes the right balance between remote data preservation and minimal impact on ongoing system latency • Highly responsive, automatic recovery, ensuring predictable results and minimizing risk in a range of disaster scenarios
12 Total cost of ownership In some cases, other usage parameters, such as bandwidth A primary objective of cloud is to reduce capital and operating consumed, may be billable as well. Typically, cloud providers expenses. XIV offers exceptional TCO value for enterprise use a monthly utilities-like billing model. Storage must be able storage, through a combination of factors, including: relatively to track the cloud-based usage of each customer, providing all low cost per TB, increasingly higher drive capacities in the the necessary information to the billing system. same footprint, and optimal capacity utilization. The extensive XIV reporting and statistics tools make the data The XIV design lowers aggregate system power consumption easily available for chargeback and billing purposes. Since the not only with high-density disk drives but also energy-efficient XIV system provides this functionality out-of-the-box, there is hardware, helping cloud providers contain costs, reduce their no need to install management services to collect the data, as carbon footprint, and execute green data center strategies.9 typical systems require.
XIV thin provisioning strengthens storage value with the The XIV Storage System can also export the information in a support of Windows Server 2012 space reclamation, variety of formats to integrate easily with resource utilization eliminating orphaned space, which lowers capital costs and software, such as IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager. decreases power consumption. The XIV solution curtails billing complexity, overhead and expense. Flexible reporting, billing and chargeback features Cloud computing is a technology-enabled business model, in which organizations pay a fee for the computing services consumed instead of purchasing and maintaining IT resources.
The most significant economic benefit of this model is the “pay-for-what-you-use” approach, in which large investments in hardware and software, and the major infrastructure maintenance effort, are replaced with dynamic payment for resources actually used. Storage resource usage is usually measured by the amount of data stored on the cloud and transferred to and from the cloud.
13 Conclusion: Delivering on the The XIV Storage System’s transformational virtualized design, promise of cloud computing powerful architecture and integration with virtualized environments are ideal for any delivery model and any stage of Cloud computing is a strategic solution for driving cost savings cloud implementation. Its breakthrough management and realizing results, while promoting deployment flexibility simplifies the administrative effort, while IBM Hyper-Scale and accelerating implementations. IBM is leading the charge scales management simplicity and flexibility across the data in cloud services, ranking as a “cloud champion” by a BTC center, helping organizations address dynamic needs and get Logic survey.10 the most out of the storage on the floor. IBM XIV storage, a robust component of the IBM private As evidenced by XIV success stories, private cloud customers cloud portfolio, offers unique value to compute cloud and hosted service providers alike are leveraging XIV storage environments, integrating IBM server and storage products, to deliver on their cloud business models. and value-added software such as Tivoli storage management products and cloud management systems such as OpenStack. It An end-to-end compute cloud solution featuring IBM XIV is no wonder that so many Fortune 500 companies rely on storage minimizes storage management overhead, creates an IBM cloud solutions. agile, future-driven environment and can ensure continuous business operations, helping the organization achieve its cloud The cloud-proven success of general-purpose XIV storage objectives and drive organizational vision and efficiencies. across a variety of industries makes IBM XIV storage an essential element of an IT cloud infrastructure.
Figure 4: IBM XIV storage provides GUI-based capacity reporting for pay-for-what-you-use billing.
14 About the IBM XIV Storage System easily with virtualization, email, database, analytics and data The IBM XIV Storage System is a proven, high-end disk protection solutions from Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, SAS, storage system designed by listening to customers and VMware, Hyper-V, Symantec and other leading applications. addressing their storage challenges across the broadest spectrum of business applications. The XIV system plays a key role in IBM Smarter Storage solutions, integrating seamlessly with IBM ProtecTIER, The XIV system offers highly affordable storage suitable for SONAS, SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storwize® V7000 and even the most demanding workloads, providing Tier 1 Tivoli products. Customers also benefit from industry-leading consistent high performance and high reliability, at Tier 2 IBM 24x7x365 global support and service. costs. The IBM XIV Storage System offers several models, all based Never compromising performance for reliability, the XIV grid on the same proven XIV architecture and the same simple, architecture applies massive parallelism to allocate system cost-effective pricing approach whereby all functionality is resources evenly at all times and scale seamlessly, without the provided with the system software at no extra charge. need for complex, time-consuming tuning and configuration. For more information A recognized industry leader in enterprise storage To learn more about the IBM XIV Storage System, please manageability, the XIV system sets a new standard for ease of contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business use by automating most tasks, providing an exceptionally Partner, or visit ibm.com/xiv intuitive user interface, and bringing operational flexibility and management consolidation across the data center. Its grid To learn more about IBM Hyper-Scale, read the IBM white architecture enables performance to grow with capacity and paper: https://ibm.biz/BdxLD2 integrates seamlessly with cloud technologies for even greater agility in accommodating growth. Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financing can enable effective cash management, protection from The XIV Storage System has thousands of installations in technology obsolescence, improved total cost of ownership and diverse industries worldwide, including financial services, return on investment. Also, our Global Asset Recovery healthcare, energy, education and manufacturing. Services help address environmental concerns with new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more information on IBM The XIV system supports a wide range of workload needs, Global Financing, visit: ibm.com/financing from capacity-hungry to ultra-high performance. It integrates
15 1. “Agenda Overview for Cloud Computing, 2013”, Gartner, © Copyright IBM Corporation 2013 January 2, 2013. IBM Corporation 2. “Enterprise Cloud Public and Private End-User Adoption Signals Systems and Technology Group Continued Shifts in IT Spending”, IDC, Doc # 237171, October 23, Route 100 2012. Somers, New York 10589 3. “The CDW 2011 Cloud Computing Tracking Poll”, CDW, 2011. Produced in the United States of America 4. “Enterprise Cloud Public and Private End-User Adoption Signals June 2013 Continued Shifts in IT Spending”, IDC, Doc # 237171, October 23, 2012. IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, FlashCopy, IBM SmartCloud, POWER7, Power Systems, PowerVM, ProtecTIER, Storwize, System Storage, 5. “Harvest the Benefits of Storage Virtualization”, InformationWeek, System x, Tivoli and XIV are trademarks of International Business March 20, 2013. See: https://ibm.biz/BdxLDy. Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product 6. All performance data contained in this publication was obtained in an and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A IBM lab environment under simulated conditions and is presented as current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and an illustration. Performance obtained in other operating environments trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml may vary, and customers should conduct their own testing. Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the 7. Ibid. United States and other countries.
8. IBM intends to add support for self-service capacity provisioning of Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and the Windows logo are trademarks block storage, including with the IBM XIV Storage System, through of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. the use of IBM SmartCloud Storage Access. 9. All performance data contained in this publication was obtained in an This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be IBM lab environment under simulated conditions and is presented as changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country an illustration. Performance obtained in other operating environments in which IBM operates. may vary, and customers should conduct their own testing. The performance data and client examples cited are presented for 10. “BTC Logic Ranks: Top Ten Cloud Companies”, BTC Logic, illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending Q3 2011. See: https://ibm.biz/BdxLDM. on specific configurations and operating conditions. It is the user’s responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any other products or programs with IBM products and programs.
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Actual available storage capacity may be reported for both uncompressed and compressed data and will vary and may be less than stated.
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