In this time of political campaigning, candidates are trying to define their opponents before they can introduce themselves. IBM has announced the XIV candidacy by stealth and has then kept quiet while its competition defines the product for it. To add to the confusion, Wikibon has learned that installations are hearing three sets of messages from IBM:
- The XIV evangelists, who say the XIV can do everything;
- The current storage specialist, who are trying to keep the XIV out, especially from DS8000 accounts;
- IBM storage marketing, who initially positioned the XIV as a Web 2.0 box.
The XIV is designed with a radical new architecture. It is new in the marketplace, with very few customers. Initial feedback from some of those customers has been good, but it is too early to be certain about the performance, availability, and storage management characteristics of the XIV, and what is storage management best practice for this architecture. There are no famous IBM Redbooks as yet.
One of the important areas of understanding is the performance of the XIV as it reaches a utilization of 85% or more of its maximum capacity with aggressive I/O rates. Storage administrators will need to know when the system will break and how to know when an XIV system hits the knee of the curve.
Action Item: Storage administrators should kick the tires for longer than usual with this array and focus on XIV performance characteristics. Storage executives should demand and read multiple Redbooks from IBM and ask for detailed workload characteristics, I/O rates, and response times from success stories. Oh… and storage executives should write up their experiences on Wikibon (or call me and I will write it up for them) so that the whole community can learn best practice about a potentially groundbreaking architecture.
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