Page 1
® ® Optimizing Enterprise Storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with IBM XIV White Paper | June 2009...
Page 2
TCO Reinvented Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, System Storage, XIV, and the XIV logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. These and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with the appropriate symbol (®...
Benton of GlassHouse Technologies Inc. notes that Gartner and Forrester attribute as much as 60-70% of overall storage TCO to the Administration factor. This large figure likely comes from grouping Administration together with Backup/Restore and other cost factor categories. Here, we break them out separately. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...
1 TB drives. This is because these systems, unlike IBM XIV, do not use 1 TB drives for tier 1 or even tier 2 storage; rather, for archiving and other needs that do not require high performance or high reliability.
Page 6
By taking a balanced and comprehensive approach to reducing all cost factors, the XIV system succeeds in dramatically reducing TCO where other systems fail. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...
TCO Reinvented Figure 3: Overall TCO: Traditional Tier-1 storage vs. XIV storage Acquisition Costs The IBM XIV Storage System is designed to be cost-efficient in all aspects, while delivering outstanding and consistent performance. The XIV system’s: ► Single-tier architecture supports all kinds of storage in one environment and makes scaling easy ►...
The XIV system minimizes costs and provides exceptional flexibility by treating hardware as an interchangeable commodity. Built entirely of off-the-shelf hardware components, the XIV system is designed to integrate the latest disks, modules, interconnects, and Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...
(see below). However, in many systems, this feature has been added to the existing architecture, making it harder to manage and of limited scope. The IBM XIV system provides thin provisioning as a core feature of its design, handily managed at the click of a button.
Management overhead. Storage teams often over-allocate volumes to avoid the time-consuming task of resizing them later. Reclaiming unused space is cumbersome, requiring time and skill – purchasing more capacity is often considered the lesser evil. (Of course, extra capacity also requires management overhead.) Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...
Page 11
The downside to this approach is that when the pools are from different tiers, spare space is taken from all over the system, increasing the overhead needed to track where the data resides. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...
Whenever new physical capacity is added, the XIV system automatically integrates the new capacity across all the disks and modules and swiftly redistributes the load to maintain perfect balance. For more information on IBM XIV volume distribution and load balancing, see the IBM XIV Performance Reinvented white paper.
Summary: How to reduce acquisition costs The IBM XIV Storage System helps organizations minimize capital outlay by means of: ► A single-tier architecture ►...
While these indirect savings are often overlooked and/or underestimated, the simple fact is that if physical space is not available, a data center must be expanded or relocated. The space-efficient IBM XIV Storage System may well help protect an organization’s existing infrastructure investment.
Administration and Management Costs Less management overhead The IBM XIV Storage System is architected to manage itself as much as possible and be managed with minimal effort. Its easy and intuitive user interface is like no other in the industry, and an outward reflection of an efficient, well-structured architecture.
Summary: How to reduce management costs The IBM XIV system dramatically reduces storage management effort and related costs by automating performance tuning and other traditionally manual management functions, simplifying daily administrative tasks, and offering capacity efficiencies that reduce the overall amount of physical capacity that needs to be managed.
The IBM XIV Storage System is designed and implemented to grow, shrink, or change without the need to reconfigure or shut down the system at any time. The administrative headaches enumerated above have been eliminated through XIV's single-tier, constantly balanced architecture.
Summary: How to reduce downtime costs The IBM XIV system is exceptional in its ability to avoid most of the traditional causes of unplanned downtime. It achieves this through reduced hardware requirements, automated and simplified management, self-healing, and hot-code fixes.
Page 19
– and much less unplanned downtime. In a nutshell, the IBM XIV Storage System takes a breakthrough approach on multiple levels to deliver a total cost of ownership that is dramatically lower than that typically associated with high-end storage solutions offering comparable functionality and services.
Your potential savings may be even greater should your data center be at its physical limits. Switching to the XIV system may allow renovations or a move to a larger facility to be delayed or avoided, saving the expense and disruption such a change would entail. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009...