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Let me just start by saying that I’m not biased – I’m really not. Form 15g In Word Format on this page. No, really, I’m not.

SAN Storage Simulator – Cisco, Netapp, EMC. IBM Simulator for XIV. IBM does seem to have simulator for DS-Storage + XIV product lines. SAN Storage Simulator – Cisco, Netapp, EMC, IBM Posted on April 21, 2013 by bhojas2. IBM does seem to have simulator for DS-Storage + XIV product lines.

I promise I’m not biased, cross my heart. Honestly I get no more out of recommending IBM than I do from anyone else. Really, I’m working with Netapp this week, EMC next week, and HDS the week after that. I’m not biased at all.

If I seem to be labouring the point, it’s because over the last year and a half, I’ve found that every time I talk about how good IBM’s XIV storage array is, after a few minutes people start giving me funny looks (funnier than usual) and asking “what’s in it for you?”. Given that I spent the first years of my IT career designing solutions around EMC Symmetrix and in the years since have spent my time designing storage solutions for every major player in the market (and a good number of minor ones) I really don’t see myself as having any one favourite. Gamecube Dol. With no exceptions, the organisations I’ve worked for have been vendor-neutral, and I’ve never really got the hang of the cordial hatred that vendors seem to have for each other’s products. Lately, I’ve found that so many people are primed with the idea that anyone who even mentions XIV as a possible solution must be in the pocket of the IBM sales mafia. I’ve no sooner begun talking about the benefits of the architecture, when people begin to question my impartiality. I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is, people are used to storage technologies (and technology in general) letting them down. No storage technology is ever perfect – there are always hidden flaws and gotchas which surface only after the array has your organisation’s most precious data stored in its belly.

So anyone who comes along talking enthusiastically about an array which “just works” is automatically suspect. It’s big, it’s expensive – so it must have problems. So in this article I’m going to look briefly at the benefits of the array but concentrate mainly on the issues I’ve experienced in the last year and a half of working with XIV, thus finally demonstrating my sceptical side. The benefits Anyone who’s read a marketing slide from IBM knows the benefits of XIV – it’s easy to manage, stores up to 79TB in one rack space, is highly resilient and performs well at a low price. With an increasing number of my customers running happily on XIV, I have no reason to disagree – in the large, well publicised (important) areas covered by the marketing brochures, the XIV really does “just work”.

To me then, the XIV has earned its place at the top table. At 79TB of capacity and 50 to 70,000 IOPS performance each, it’s never going to compete on a 1:1 basis with the largest Symmetrix or Tagmastore arrays (200,000 IOPS and 600TB of Tier 1 storage anyone?) but then it does cost around 10x less than these arrays, and I’ve found that several XIV arrays will work as well as one large array (a Tier 1 array with the capabilities discussed above will take up 9-10 rack spaces in the datacentre, compared to 4 for the equivalent XIV). The old chestnut “Double drive failure on an XIV will lose data!” scream competing vendors, somehow managing to imply that in a similar situation, their own systems would operate untouched. Maybe one day this will happen to one of my XIV customers and I’ll know for sure – in the meantime I have to go off “interpretations of the architecture” and “assumptions of how the array will work”.