TCO
Reinvented
Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
12
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.
Ease of use
The XIV system
’s highly intuitive GUI greatly simplifies day-to-day storage administration,
enabling most tasks to be executed in just a few clicks. The result is a dramatic reduction
in the time required to, among other things, provision storage, resize volumes, create
storage pools, and even take snapshots
– in most cases, a reduction from hours and
days to a few minutes or less. Training on the XIV system is also quick. Exceptional ease
of use helps organizations reduce costs by enabling them to assign fewer IT individuals to
storage management tasks, even data migration tasks.
In fact, this ease of use combines with XIV role-based access and authorization to offer a
new IT paradigm: any staff member, including one without special storage skills, can
provision and manage storage. It is conceivable, for example, that DBAs handle
provisioning, without external assistance, controlling only those volumes they are
authorized to handle based on
role. The XIV system’s ability to enable lesser skilled
personnel to manage ongoing growth translates to substantial potential savings in overall
TCO.
Easy monitoring
The XIV system hugely simplifies the monitoring and maintenance of system health,
including through alerts sent to select personnel via automated e-mail, SMS, and SNMP
that clearly identify a problem and its source. The result is a highly transparent system
with speedy mechanisms for easily and efficiently handling maintenance and issues as
they arise.
Reduced deployment time
The XIV system obviates the traditional need to intensively plan the layout of application
volumes on physical storage units. Its automated, optimized approach to volume
distribution and load balancing significantly reduces storage deployment time; many XIV
customers report that deployment took less than a day.
Self-tuning
The XIV system automates performance tuning, with the complexities of load balance, the
location of mirrored data, and data distribution hidden from the user. With the XIV system,
consistent high performance is achieved without the need to tune, reconfigure or
rebalance to disperse hot spots. It maintains optimal performance, with no need for
performance optimizing software products.
