IBM XIV is a high-performance storage solution designed to meet the needs of businesses requiring efficient data management and scalability. It offers a reliable and flexible storage architecture that is easily scalable and highly secure.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| IBM XIV | 3.6% |
| HPE 3PAR StoreServ | 12.4% |
| NetApp FAS Series | 10.7% |
| Other | 73.3% |
IBM XIV provides enterprise-grade storage capabilities with a focus on simplicity and resilience in data storage. It supports dynamic scaling, allowing businesses to adapt to growing data requirements seamlessly. Designed to deliver high availability and efficient data protection, it integrates well with existing IT environments. Utilizing a grid architecture, IBM XIV ensures data is distributed evenly for optimal performance and reliability. Its intuitive management features reduce complexity in data handling.
What features make IBM XIV stand out?Organizations in sectors like finance and healthcare turn to IBM XIV for its reliable data management and storage efficiency. Its ability to dynamically scale and efficiently handle large volumes of data makes it suitable for industries that demand quick data access and secure storage. Implementation is tailored to integrate with sector-specific compliance and demands, making it adaptable to unique operational environments.
IBM XIV was previously known as XIV.
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| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| IT Operation Engineer at HNB | 3.5 | I find IBM XIV's NVMe features, de-duplication, and compression valuable and responsive. It's stable and good value for money, though scalability is limited. Support is okay. I've used it for 2.5 years and rate it 7/10. |
| Sr. System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees | 4.0 | I find this solution easy to set up and use for provisioning and reporting. However, it experiences stability issues during rebuilds, power supply problems, and has limited scalability, making it better for mid-range, not heavy, loads. |
| Systems Engineer | 2.5 | We found the XIV easy to set up with good data distribution, but it couldn't meet our latency demands for heavy, production workloads. It proved unsuitable for our needs, being better suited for non-production environments. |
| Senior Storage Engineer with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I find XIV robust and performant with excellent setup costs and no license fees. However, I experienced pool resize restrictions during drive failures, and customer service is only average. It's best for small datacenters. |
| Systems Engineer V, Enterprise Storage Systems at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 4.0 | I highly value this storage platform's exceptional ease of management and reliability. My main frustration is its dated Java-based management interface, and I see IBM moving away from this product. |
| Sr. Systems Programmer at Sharp | 5.0 | I find the XIV storage highly reliable, stable, and easy to manage, offering predictable latency and excellent capacity. Setup was straightforward, and IBM support is great. While cost could improve, its overall value undeniably exceeds my expectations. |
IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness.
I've been using IBM XIV for two and a half years.
IBM XIV is stable.
IBM XIV's scalability is adequate for our requirements, but because it's modular, you can't scale to larger requirements.
IBM's technical support is all right.
We have a five-year total cost of ownership where we pay an initial amount and then annually for maintenance.
We evaluated Hitachi, NetApps, and EMC, and based on the support levels and the price, we decided it was cheaper to go with IBM.
IBM XIV is attractive because it gives value for money in terms of features. I would give IBM XIV a rating of seven out of ten.
Very easy to produce reporting data (Snaps). Very easy and fast for provisioning devices and Remote mirroring.
Implementing Remote mirroring and local Snaps is very easy. The ROW (Redirect-On-Write) of Snaps has no impact on production data.
I encountered stability (performance) issues during enclosure or disk rebuild. Also some power supply issues due to malfunctions of circuits. Sometimes "internal" Snap sessions hang and consume pool capacity.
The active front-end ports are according to the ordered capacity, and new ports are activated when you order extra. The number of usable ports in a full capacity configuration (excluding for Remote mirroring) are so low compared to high-end storages. If I remember correctly, it was six modules of four ports, minus at least four for mirroring. The queue per port was 1400 (may have changed).
Very good.
Working with VMAX. Company changed due to economic reasons. (They still use multi-vendor storages).
It was amazingly easy.
EMC VMAX 10K, 3PAR, DS.
I see XIV as a mid-range (not high-end) storage. Easy to install, small size factor/capacity, easy to use, quick to provision. Not for heavy load, especially sequential due to wide/mirror stripping. Smallest provisioned capacity is 17GB (increments by 17GB), has easy CLI, and alerting.
Data availability: As it spreads, a chuck of 1MB across the board means using all available spindles on the backend.
This product was not a good fit for our organization as we have a ton of latency sensitive applications and XIV was not able to keep up with IO + latency demand.
Adding an SSD tier to improve the latency demand as this product was sold as being a Tier 1.5 array, but it is far from that.
Seven years.
Nope.
Nope.
Good.
We switched to XIV as it was marketed as being almost a high-end array.
XIV setup is very straightforward and easy to configure.
Licensing is straightforward.
No, as we were moving away from our old CX3 Clariion arrays.
Don't use it for heavy workloads and latency sensitive workloads. It can be a good fit for nonproduction environments like test, dev, uat, and cat.
No-license-required policy, unlike others where you need a license for everything. Just pay once and forget about licenses.
The XIVs here are only being used for non-production and dev systems, but still the performance and robustness of the systems are very good.
There are a few. One that comes to my mind is the pool resize restriction in the case of drive failure. Until the drive is replaced, the pool_resizing is locked. This has been an issue a lot of times, especially when the contract says IBM will not replace disks until three drives fail. (Single drive replacement can be requested as well in severe cases).
Three to four years, in this project.
No, so far there have been no issues with stability.
No.
Average. There is IBM support on this product, but sometimes it’s hard to get support from them.
No, DS8K or SVC has always been the primary solution for this customer. For all my customers, XIV has always been a backend storage.
Initial setup was done before I joined.
Excellent.
I am not the direct customer. We can only recommend various solutions to the customer.
The product is good but only if you have a small datacenter.
Ease of operation. Hands down, this is the easiest storage platform on the market to manage. It's essentially a fire-and-forget sort of solution. In our situation, we have these behind-the-scenes storage brokers (SVC), so we really never touch them at all, except for having support do code updates.
It does not improve function as much as it doesn't hinder function it. Since it is so reliable and easy to use, we spend almost zero time managing it.
Management accessibility. Both the GUI and the CLI require installation of a Java-based thick client, which is ridiculous, plus a drain on resources. Also, if you have a large complex version of XIV, the GUI must contact and load each one of the units before the GUI is available for use. This is frustrating.
I would rather have a web GUI served directly from the unit, and a CLI accessible directly through SSH. For multi-system management, it might be useful to have a thick client, or a hub of some sort, but there is almost no reason to have a GUI that requires communication with all of your units at once just to make a volume or mapping.
Almost five years.
We have had one FC port on one of the 17 units that we have had which has given us particular consistency issues. We suspect an issue in the XIV module itself, but given that there are 24 ports on each unit, it's not a giant concern.
Historically, there has been no way to expand beyond the maximum provided in a single rack, so using SVC was required.
Good, though not much tech support has been needed.
DS8000 and ESS. Cost was significantly higher on the DS platform, and the management was much more complex.
Provided power and networking connections are in existence prior to equipment arrival, we can have one of these units receiving data within a couple hours of placement on the datacenter floor.
Never pay face value. There is always a discount. Also, if you are a mostly-blue shop, the discounts get super deep. If you are going to use the product behind an SVC, IBM will price the units lower, since you are likely not to use any of the advanced copy services.
We were pretty tied to IBM, so only DS units. Lately, we have been considering the V-series units, as well.
The product is exceptionally reliable and very easy to manage.
It's a solid, mature product. However, there are indications that IBM is not looking to extend the product range, but rather is pushing people toward its new A9000 platforms, which can be tied together with XIV-like functionality.
For us, the XIV is pretty much set-it-and-forget-it storage. We use it behind the SAN volume controller. Having presented that storage to the SAN, we find that the latency is very predictable, the capacity is excellent and the reliability is fabulous. I have been very happy with the XIVs we have here. We have had them for about three years and (KNOCK KNOCK) they have yet to fail a single drive (I think this might be because the system is optimized to use RAM, “flash assist” (800G flash unit per XIV shelf), and 4G disk drives for the things that each do best).
It saved a lot of time. We haven't had any outages and outages in the healthcare industry are terrible. They're like earthquakes that have repercussions for years afterwards.
It could be cheaper, but considering they give you a rack of 325 TB usable, if you buy a fully loaded system, it's really not that expensive. As part of the base package, it comes with a lot of value-add (snapshots,etc...) too, so those things need to be considered when comparing to other systems which do not include this.
I guess we'd like to see the XIV keep pace with how storage is going in terms of speed and latency. Basically, what you would buy at this point is the A9000R and that's probably the fastest system on the planet right now. They're basically doing what I'd like to see.
It's really stable. We haven't had any outages. We haven't even had any failed drives since we've installed it.
It gives you 325 TB usable per rack, so it's very scalable. Since we're using it behind the SVC, we could just bring in five more, if we had the money, and just completely scale it behind the SVC without any difficulty whatsoever.
We have an arrangement with IBM. They come out and they do the disk drive replacement, which they haven't have to do yet. They basically won't come out until there are three failed drives because that's the way the model works. They have done a couple of firmware upgrades and disk drive firmware upgrades, on the frame itself and the drives. That's all handled really well by their support center.
We have really good tech support from IBM; really good contacts. They're sort of our personal liaison.
I used 3PAR, sort of, in a test mode, NetApp in a test mode, and the SVC. All three of those we tested in-house. We didn't test the EMC in-house.
The 3PAR was actually OK. In my opinion, it was the best of the other ones that we looked at, but the GUI was a little bit difficult to use. The IBM GUI is much easier to use and the SVC provides a lot of features that just aren't in the 3PAR. You could use anything behind the SVC and the SVC would make it easy.
I found the NetApp fairly cumbersome. We use OpenVMS and that was another problem with the NetApp: trying to use that with VMS.
The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are reliability; ease of use in managing the storage because we manage it a lot, we have a lot of changes to make; and interoperability with the systems that we have in house, such as OpenVMS.
Initial setup was pretty straightforward. We're really used to setting up arrays there. It has six ports per fabric; that's what we’re using. We just set up the cabling, did the zoning, and followed the recommended procedures; there were no problems, whatsoever. There were no unexpected surprises.
I didn't pick out XIV personally, but we looked at a bunch of different storage vendors. The technical people really wanted to go with IBM compared to the other vendors, mostly because we had already been familiar with it, but we did several in-house PoCs for other vendors too. The IBM just worked much better with the stuff we had. The GUI was much better. The CLI was better. For us, it was much better.
For our stuff, we looked at 3PAR, NetApp and EMC.
We have had no problems with it and it exceeded expectations as far as speed, latency and reliability.
If it starts out being perfect and then there are problems, the rating would go down. But so far there haven't been any problems.
The interface is fine. We don't use it that much because we just take big chunks of it and present it as MDisks to the IVM.
This system, for us, is actually a set and forgot type of system. We have presented the array to San volume controller, and manage it from there, and we are also using flashsystem 900 for our super fast storage (we are very lucky to have this storage architecture – it’s really good).
As you are probably aware, they have since come out with the a9000 and a9000r which pair the XIV architecture with the flashsystem 900 flash backend, including compression and dedupe. I’m sure we will be looking at this when it is time to refresh. I don’t think anyone yet has a system that truly competes for speed with the flashsystem 900. emc now has a one new system (very expensive) and pure storage (I think it’s the flashblade system but don’t quote me on it) – they are way late to the game and all the others are even further behind still using “SSD” form factor. All the devices (basically all, except the aforementioned) that use what is basically a disk interface (e.g. SAS) are slowing down their flash.
Probably for absolute MAX performance, one would still use standalone flashsystem 900, but the a9000r will give great performance while reducing the price quite a bit by using the compression and dedupe.
