IBM Buys XIV, Maker Of Grid-Like Storage Systems

On December 31, 2007, IBM announced closing the acquisition of Israel based storage systems vendor XIV for an undisclosed amount, but speculated to be in the $300-350MM range. This deal is interesting in terms of technology, as well as politics. Regarding politics, XIV’s Chairman Moshe Yanai was a pioneer at EMC, personally designing the Symmetrix system that continues to be a high-end storage market leader as today’s DMX systems. IBM’s investment in his technology and his company is a validation of the individual who EMC cast aside, as well as the product approach that XIV is taking in the storage market.

The technology itself is an example of a grid-like or clustered storage system that uses industry standard x86 servers with dense drives that are clustered together to form a cohesive storage system. With such an architecture, costs are kept low as there are no custom chipsets or wiring, scalability is easier as the system automatically rebalances across the new nodes, and scaling up improves aggregate performance as the addition of nodes adds processing power, cache and I/O throughput. For many workloads, this type of storage system appears to be the future of storage, offering lower acquisition cost, increased flexibility of data management, massive scalability and much easier management. IBM is not the first vendor to move towards such an architecture, with companies like Isilon, Compellent, Lefthand Networks, 3PAR, EqualLogic (recently acquired by Dell) and Network Appliance offering elements of this type of architecture today. Google, Amazon, Cleversafe and Iron Mountain have similar offerings that they intend to use for software-as-a-service offerings. Even the leader in traditional storage systems appears to be moving in this direction with their Maui/Hulk announcements and their purchase of backup service provider Berkley Data Systems.

IBM has lots of moving parts in their current storage portfolio, with LSI and Network Appliance acting as key partners in bringing current products to market. While there is definitely tremendous potential from moving to a clustered architecture, execution will be critical. Most important will be enabling file access to XIV technology, which does not support CIFS, NFS or clustered/distributed file system capabilities natively, access methods that are critical to Web 2.0 and rich media storage applications. Also, creating a clear strategy of where XIV based technology will make sense for customers compared to existing offerings, and building a robust ecosystem of application partners to integrate with this technology will be critical for success. So far, IBM has shown the strength of the XIV technology, what they need to do next is present a clear vision of how it will fit with their future offerings.

By Andrew Reichman

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