With XIV, IBM is signaling that it has an increased appetite for storage R&D. To make its investments pay off, IBM is combining a low-cost, volume commodity approach with an innovative architecture that is aimed at the sweet spot of the data center. Unfortunately it’s not quite ready for prime time. Users should kick the tires of XIV to determine the degree to which automated performance management will change storage administration best practice. The bottom line on XIV is it legitimizes fully virtualized architectures. The question users should answer on XIV is do the lower acquisition costs and simpler management attributes warrant the substantial migration costs and risks of moving from existing platforms.