IBM XIV Storage System Storage Reinvented: Secure, Cloud-Optimized Enterprise Storage That Scales with Ease

IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet IBM XIV Storage System Storage reinvented: Secure, cloud-optimized enterprise storage that scales with ease As the planet becomes more instrumented, interconnected and intelli- Highlights gent, your business faces the challenge of managing huge quantities of data and extracting the most value from it—efficiently and flexibly— ●● ●●Deliver consistent, tuning-free, high while meeting the needs of employees, partners and customers. Having performance and remarkable ease of use via a grid-based architecture the right storage is fundamental to survival and growth. ●● ●●Provide linear scaling up to 325 TB per IBM® XIV® Storage System is high-end disk storage that supports the array and IBM Hyper-Scale for extreme operational agility over multiple systems need for high performance, availability, operational flexibility and security while helping minimize costs and complexity. Built optimized to simplify ●● ●●Enable elasticity, open-standards storage, XIV Storage System is enabling thousands of organizations to support and mixed-workload affinity for optimized compute clouds and take control of their storage and gain business insights from their data. virtualized environments Designed for consistent, enterprise-level performance and five-nines availability, XIV storage handles static and dynamic workloads with ease. ●● ●●Offer high reliability and availability via full redundancy, self healing and Never compromising performance for reliability, the XIV grid architec- unprecedented rebuild speed ture delivers massive parallelism—resulting in uniform allocation of ●● ●●Provide compelling data economics system resources at all times. XIV storage secures your data through through superb price-performance, industry-standard data-at-rest encryption while keeping performance low-touch and simplified management, uninterrupted—with separate key management support by IBM Tivoli® footprint density, power efficiency and all-inclusive software licensing Key Lifecycle Manager. XIV storage sets a new standard for ease of use by automating most tasks and providing an extraordinarily intuitive user interface—and scaling its ease of management to a multi-system XIV environment. An equally rich and comprehensive command line interface (CLI) is provided for tailor- ing the system to user requirements. IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard enables anytime, anywhere XIV monitoring via iOS- and Android-based devices. IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet Exceptionally elastic, XIV storage delivers strengths that are an available to all system data and based on optimally utilized com- ideal match for the unique requirements of cloud computing. modity solid-state drives (SSDs). Operating with advanced Through IBM Hyper-Scale, XIV offers a new paradigm in algorithms, XIV components help meet requirements for scalability for cloud and large deployments: extremely high performance, such as ever-changing virtualized and cloud environments, and complex application scenarios ●●●IBM Hyper-Scale Mobility enables customers to move vol- involving business intelligence, archiving, data warehousing, umes between multiple XIV systems and without host streaming backup and large numbers of mailboxes, as well application interruption, facilitating capacity management as demanding ProtecTIER deduplication installations and and optimal asset use. online-transaction processing (OLTP). ●●●IBM Hyper-Scale Consistency enables customers to coordi- nate consistent snapshots of an application’s volumes that The XIV system offers seamless scale-up from 28 to 325 TB by span multiple XIV systems, enhancing data protection simply adding system modules and is available in configurations solutions. of 4 TB, 3 TB, 2 TB or 1 TB. For all configurations, XIV stor- ●●●IBM Hyper-Scale Manager enables customers to manage age performs with autonomic redistribution of system data as multiple XIV systems with simplicity via a consolidated, modules are added. integrated display and to customize their cloud with the XIV Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API). Architecture matters XIV storage is deployed with success in diverse industries XIV storage is an ever-evolving, “no-excuses” answer to customer worldwide, including financial, healthcare, telecommunications, requirements for an easy-to-manage, flexible, powerful and highly managed services, energy and manufacturing. It integrates easily available high-end system that meets multiple workload needs, with virtualization, email, database, analytics, data protection including for cloud and analytics, and scales easily over time. The grid architecture is at the root of the system’s far-reaching and other solutions from leading providers such as VMware, customer value. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle Solaris, SAS and Symantec. It plays a key role in IBM end-to-end dynamic infrastructure solutions, integrating with IBM ProtecTIER®, IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), the IBM Storwize® family— Born optimized for consistent high including IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller (SVC)—IBM Tivoli products, IBM SmartCloud® Storage performance Driving XIV performance benefits is the massively parallel grid Access and IBM PureFlex™ System. architecture, which delivers hotspot-free, consistent, predictable high performance to all applications at all times—tuning-free. XIV storage features advanced hardware components for out- This same service level is maintained even during peak load standing performance. Its InfiniBand backplane offers massive periods, management or maintenance activities, and disk recov- throughput and low latency, while dozens of powerful CPU ery. The XIV design provides performance optimization that cores, abundant RAM, 8 Gbps Fibre Channel and 10 Gbps enables ultimate use of system resources, uniform workload iSCSI ports, and an advanced motherboard can address distribution across all system drives and the freedom to use the highest, most-demanding application workload needs. advanced functions without affecting application performance. Customers requiring ultra-high performance have the option of benefitting from management-free XIV flash caching, 2 IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet Several architectural features contribute to the XIV system’s unique performance profile: ●●●Massive parallelism in a fully distributed architecture: XIV system uses a distributed architecture of interconnected modules, each with its own multi-core CPU, ample cache, flash caching (optional) and high-density disk drives working in parallel to efficiently serve data to client applications. Every data volume is randomly spread across all modules and disks in the system—the aggregate power of the entire system is continually available to every application. The XIV system presents this collection of disks as a single, large, elastic data store on the storage network. ●●●Distributed data: The system stores data by breaking it down into 1 MB chunks (partitions), each mirrored for redundancy to another module. The system distributes all the partitions automatically and uniformly across all the disks by means of a sophisticated pseudo-random distribution algorithm. Consolidated view of XIV storage metrics for in-depth analysis ●●●Distributed cache: A flexible and powerful cache implemen- tation allows the XIV system to leverage large slots for reads ●●●Load balancing: The system automatically distributes the while managing a smaller slot size, resulting in a superior application load across all system modules uniformly, putting cache hit ratio and, consequently, better performance. the aggregate power of all modules at the service of all ●●●Flash caching (optional): XIV leverages its architecture to requests concurrently. By doing so, it avoids many of the use flash for caching across all volumes, benefiting all appli- performance and reliability risks that can plague traditional cations without managing tiers. It uses the flash drives to clustered controller designs. deliver a huge amount of caching memory, read-caching the ●●●Hotspot-free: Changes to the application or its I/O pattern most frequently accessed data dynamically and adaptively— do not affect system performance; as workloads change and boosting performance by up to 4.5 times for database-like evolve, the system always remains hotspot-free. workloads.1 ●●●Configuration change: Each volume is evenly distributed ●●●Distributed bandwidth within modules: Aggressive pre- across all modules and disk drives within the system. The fetching is enabled by the large cache-to-disk bandwidth data distribution is adjusted automatically whenever the available within each module, together with the extremely number of functional disks or modules changes, ensuring large aggregate module interconnectivity bandwidth that is optimal data layout and, consequently, optimal use of system available on the XIV backplane. resources at all times. ●●●Smart scaling: Any increase in capacity—through the addi- ●●●High bandwidth between and within modules: tion of disk modules—is accompanied by a corresponding Communication between modules takes place over an inter- increase in processing power, cache, flash caching (optional) nal, redundant InfiniBand network equipped with massive and connectivity to maintain a high performance level as the bandwidth, which supports rapid rebuilding when necessary. system scales. Each module has its own extremely large CPU-to-memory and disk-to-memory bandwidth. 3 IBM Systems and Technology Data Sheet ●●●Huge processing

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