Originating Author: Nicholas Allen
Before IBM acquired it, XIV was a niche company with an interesting product. Now with the muscle of IBM, a low product cost, great features, and superior ease of use, IBM is well positioned to compete in many market segments where it did not have competitive products.
Competitors cannot afford to ignore this threat. But will users take lower capital costs and ease-of-use over greener products with lower operating costs? Clearly the success of innovators such as 3PAR and Compellent has shown how powerful a selling point is ease-of-use. Historically, however, ease-of-use has found broader acceptance in smaller shops – small in people, not storage capacity. But, today the market is larger and XIV is a good fit for clients who want to be able to rapidly grow capacity without managing multiple tiers of storage to increase performance and reduce cost.
Moreover, the industry has struggled for years with storage management approaches such as HSM, ILM and now tiered storage. IBM’s XIV consolidated utility storage does away with those approaches and this argument will likely be compelling to a large segment of the market particularly for fast growing, dynamic mixed, and emerging workloads
In addition, while there is much talk these days about Green Storage, many IT shops don’t even see the electric bill and do not have any green IT initiatives. And, IBM’s XIV provides high-speed performance while relying on lower-power SATA drives. What’s more, we think it likely that IBM will add a grouping capability aimed at being able to power off some drives.
Action Item: Vendors should not only focus on green storage, but green storage that is easy to use and is based on commodity hardware.
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