Thanks Steve. Without pasting in the IBM XIV content, at a high level it is a unique "tier-less" storage platform. From the IO perspective, it is similar to other array platforms. There may be some engineering level differences, but this area is not what makes it unique. It utilizes SATA storage technology. It uses mirroring and grid-like availability modules to ensure high availability. It comes with all of the advanced array software that you normally buy as add-ons to other solutions like replication and snapshots. Where you normally would have to engineer storage through parity groups and building complex configurations, XIV is more like a toaster and I don't mean that in a negative way. It writes across all drives in the system so you have a ton of spindles going. This is why it is considered tier-less; you are already using the cheapest drives you can get so you don't concern yourself too much with tiers. You can see performance issues when collocating high performance applications on this array and the downside in this case is there is not much tuning you can do. We have seen performance hits on backup applications. That doesn’t mean abandon the thought. We eventually tuned our HBAs and SAN and got performance up to where we needed it to be.

The relatively low cost (about $7500/TB depending on drive choice - 1 or 2TB SATA) and the built in replication will make it a leader in my opinion as organizations look for storage that provides them with low-cost disaster recovery storage solutions. Think about it...if you use VMware for server virtualization with another array you can replicate your servers (VMware server files) across the wire to another location and it integrates with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The management interface is pretty slick and simple and monitoring of the system is simple as well.

I cannot claim that the XIV system fits all use cases but I think almost every shop has a place for it if they use centralized storage even if it is for tier 2. We use it for IBM AIX virtualization and VMware as well as native raw device maps for physical servers. It may not run as fast as EMC and Hitachi in every situation, or even IBM's DS8xxx model for that matter, but it may have a place in your data center.

I almost forgot. Up until recently you could only buy the XIV fully loaded with drives so 80TB was the smallest capacity you could get. This put the entry at about $600k. Now you can get it 1/3 or 1/2 full (need to check with your rep).

I hope this helps.

Rick