IBM’s XIV has raised lot’s of discussion on market, mostly because IBM claims that it’s enterprise class storage system running on SATA disks which are considered to be more midrange stuff.

There are plenty of cases where customers have evaluated IBM’s XIV storage system and realized that it’s amazing product. Here are couple of examples why XIV really matters:

• A service provider that had used EMC disk systems for over 10 years evaluated the IBM XIV versus upgrading to EMC V-Max. The three year total cost of ownership (TCO) of EMC’s V-Max was $7 Million US dollars higher, so EMC counter-proposed CLARiiON CX4 instead. Customer selected XIV.
• A large US bank holding company managed to get 5.3 GB/sec from a pair of XIV boxes for their analytics environment. That’s amazing performance from SATA disks!

I have seen IBM’s XIV in couple of customer environments and it’s really proven to be enterprise storage. IBM recently upgraded XIV to third generation. Same time they announced that XIV will have in future option for SSD caching which is claimed to change performance to next level at a fraction of typical SSD storage costs. Will this happen really, I will bet that this feature comes quite soon. At the same time they also made internal cache larger, added faster disk controllers and changed internal connection to InfiniBand.

IBM has proven that you can create really good performing storage by looking this from other point of view and using generic intel x64 hardware and generic SATA-disks. In fact XIV was not invented by IBM but company which was founded by Moshe Yanai (who actually leaded EMC’s Symmetrix development).

Read more about XIV from IBM’s XIV page.