Innovation is flooding the storage market as vendors seek to address customer pain points around their storage needs.
IBM has invested $2 billion this year towards acquisitions that will help it offer software tools that address the high demand for data-management and storage. One of the companies that IBM acquried was called XIV. IBM has integrated the XIV technology and now offers a massively clustered storage unit that consists of 180 standard low-cost, high-capacity but comparatively slow SATA drives. But despite the slow speed, the unit is controlled by advanced software that tweaks up the performance dramatically. And because the unit consists of off-the-shelf components, it can be offered relatively cheaply — the XIV sells for about $500,000 with a 180 TB raw system capability.
Interesting news. But what’s more interesting is the contrasts in spin coming out around the technology. There’s a lot of interest in the company because of the background of the founder. XIV founder is Moshe Yanai, a major force for EMC in the 1990’s. Yanai holds 18 key storage system patents from his days at EMC. TheStreet.com says that “IBM is pushing the storage envelope…”, and quotes an IBM Storage manager as saying that “XIV has turned out to be a brilliant acquisition.”
Analyst Josh Krishner says that “It’s a general-purpose storage system that uses parallelization to boost the performance of SATA disks. It’s probably going to take market share from the high end of Tier 2 and the lower end of Tier 1 that doesn’t require mainframe connectivity. I believe this is the main reason why the [EMC Clariion] CX4 just introduced such a big capacity upgrade. EMC seems to be the only company that understands the threat of XIV.”
Maybe EMC is the only company. Contrast that with the eWeek.com headline “Why IBM may be regretting $300M XIV Acquisition”.
ComputerWorld says that “the product appears to lack some high-end features and is targeted at only a very limited set of customers”.
