IBM touts major performance update for XIV storage line

IBM is rolling out what it describes as a major performance update for its XIV storage appliances, offering vastly improved performance while maintaining ease of use and compatibility for existing customers.

Bob Cancilla, IBM vice president for enterprise disk storage, told V3.co.uk that the update should be considered the largest since IBM acquired XIV in January 2008.

"When we acquired the company the first availability was really a blue-wash of the XIV technology," he said. "There was some small improvement in the overall manufacturing and design, but it was basically IBM-ising it."

IBM has resolved technical issues such as regulatory compliance and international availability, and turned its attention to optimising performance on the XIV hardware. The latest systems sport improvements such as support for Infiniband connections up to 20Gbit/s.

The systems also use solid-state drives (SSDs) to supplement the single-tier hard disk storage. The SSD hardware can be used as additional cache space, providing a high-speed relay between hard drives and the system's DRAM.

Cancilla explained that early sales of the XIV technology targeted traditional high-performance markets such as finance and medical imaging, but that IBM has seen strong growth in the SMB space.

IBM has shipped more than 4,500 units of the XIV platform in its two years on the market, a figure which the company hopes to build on when the new systems are released on 8 September.

"That is huge for us," Cancilla said of the sales figures. "The competitive displacement of this product in the market is greater than any other I've been associated with for IBM storage in the last 10 years."