25 July 2012

IBM XIV 11.1.1 Announced

Yesterday IBM announced details of the planned release of IBM XIV Storage System software V11.1.1 on August the 9th. The key enhancements within the software include:
  • 1 TB raw capacity per drive support
  • XIV USGv6 certification
  • SCVMM 2012 integration
  • XIV versions 11.1.x and 10.2.x certified for VMWare Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 4.1 and 5.x compliance

So why have IBM introduced 1TB drives to complement the 2TB and 3TB drives already available within XIVs? Simple, to increase interest in the XIV Gen 3 Storage Subsystems within medium size organisations and reduce upgrade costs when adding interface and data modules to existing Gen 3 XIVs. 

Previously with the 2TB drives the minimum spec XIV that could be purchased contained 55TB of usable storage (36 x 2TB drives in your 3 interface modules and 36 x 2TB drives in your 3 data modules) As a result many businesses that initially were interested in the XIV but only required an 20-50TB of storage could not consider the XIV as a realistic option. The 1TB drive announcement is a very interesting move in the enterprise storage marker via IBM.

The other major plus of the 1TB drive announcement is that businesses that have purchased the XIV can potentially minimise upgrade costs by adding additional modules containing only 1TB drives. 

As a bit of a vGeek I'm also really happy to see SRM 4.1 and 5.x are now fully supported on the XIV. IBM also recently announced a new version of the IBM Storage Replication Adapter to enable support for SRM 4.1 and 5.x on 6.3.x and 6.4.x code for SVC & V7000 is currently available however this is via RPQ only. 

Full details regarding the XIV 11.1.1 announcement from IBM are available here

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