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Is anyone here using the IBM XIV storage array? Anything you would like to share of your experience so far? We're evaluating an HP EVA along with the XIV which is very different (using commodity hardware, SATA drives, Linux appliance-like 'modules etc).

All the best, JFA

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disclosure: I'm certified on the XIV and use it in-house as well as selling it to clients. No, I don't work for IBM

We've found great success so far with the XIV. Traditional RAID is dying or becoming obsolete. Now, the only time that I'd recommend a traditional RAID-based storage subsystem when it's very small or for a specific application with well-defined I/O requirements that needs specific performance on individual LUNs rather than a balanced load across the system.

It's a great system that excels at workloads that are thrown at it. The more the better.

MikeyB
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  • Thanks MikeyB for the feedback. Have you run any benchmark on the XIV with one of the standard tools: MS SQLIO, Oracle Orion, EMC iorate or the free iometer? –  Sep 02 '09 at 00:14
  • Yes, but only either on specialized workloads or general tests that were not rigorous enough to publish to others. – MikeyB Oct 31 '09 at 03:48
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We have had the XIV since August 2009, and are very pleased with it. We are mainly a HDS and IBM shop (well, on the storage side anyways). We were looking at the AMS2500 or the XIV, and of course all things come down to cost and the XIV was much less than the AMS2500. Currently, we have VMWare (300 VMs), MS SQL and Oracle using the XIV. Prior to the XIV we had our Oracle and MS SQL applications on a AMS500 and a AMS1000 and noticed performance gains between two to three times faster.

Now we also have a HP EVA 6000 and that is solely used for one application only. It also works fine and is somewhat similar since it also uses storage pools so all the disk are busy rather than dedicated LUNs to certain host(s). I guess the big difference between the two is the XIV has no RAID Array (1MB extents are copied to other disk in another module for redundancy) and uses SATA disk and our EVA uses RAID 5 with FC disk. The funny thing is the EVA 6000 with FC disk is actually lower performer than the XIV and the rebuild of a failed 1TB disk takes us about 15 minutes to do. To be fair though, the EVA we have is two years old so a newer EVA would be a better perform than the one we have.

So, in my book, I would choose the XIV for cost, performance and is grid based. I think grid base storage arrays is the future and many other vendors also are going that direction.