Company adds support for real-time, hot code load.
IBM briefed Storage Strategies NOW on its first major enhancement to its XIV storage system since its acquisition of the company in January 2008. The company revealed some interesting statistics about XIV – 80% of XIV sales are to customers who have not bought IBM storage before, 20% of XIV customers have never bought anything from IBM before and 75% of XIV storage is attached to non-IBM server customers. IBM also claims that there are more than 1,000 XIV modules installed at customer sites such as Navisite and VCU Medical Center.
In Q4 of 2008, 24% of XIV’s revenue came from the financial industry and 20% from the public sector; not surprisingly in Q1 of 2009, revenue from the public sector increased to 32%, while that from the financial services industry fell to 12%.
The enhancements to the XIV platform are many – IBM has been busy in the last year. Among the enhancements are support for real-time, hot code load, which allows firmware changes on the fly without disrupting operations. IBM has also added a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) client, which simplifies administration of the system by setting up super-users, users, etc. The company has announced support for Tivoli Productivity Center (TPC), including not only SMI-S 1.2 support, but also support for TPC CIMOM agents that are running discovery and probe jobs. IBM has also included per host mapping capabilities for XIV clusters, which allows a cluster with shared mapping and per-host specific boot from SAN.
Most important to this release is the scalability of XIV – it now supports an unlimited number of mirrors and 256 pools of data. And, it supports data migration of as many as 512 LUNs in one session.
In addition, XIV now supports some new operating system platforms – HP-UX 11v2 and Solaris 9. IBM has also promised support for asynchronous mirroring in the second half of this year, support for iSCSI encrypted connections and instant storage reclamation using Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation’s Thin Reclamation API. The API allows unused space to be freed up and reused.
Further, IBM’s XiV now supports NAS gateways from NetApp, Onstor and GPFS 3.2.
IBM also talked with us about future plans for XIV, but we can’t talk about them yet. Stay tuned.
