Thousands of organizations are discovering that the IBM®XIV®Storage System series, with a virtualized storage architecture, is a perfect fit with VMware environments. In fact, the lion's share of customers deploy XIV together with VMware, benefiting from consistently high performance, game-changing ease of use, low TCO

1. IBM Systems and Technology
IBM XIV Storage System series
IBM XIV Storage
and VMware
Optimal storage for end-to-end virtualization
Thousands of organizations are discovering that the IBM® XIV®
Storage System series, with a virtualized storage architecture, is a perfect
fit with VMware environments. In fact, the lion’s share of customers
deploy XIV together with VMware, benefitting from consistently high
Highlights performance, game-changing ease of use, low TCO and a deep integra-
tion that specifically addresses VMware scenarios.
● Virtualized storage for stellar perform-
ance, cloud agility and scalability
● Controlled self-service storage provi- Stellar storage performance with VMware
sioning and powerful management
with a vCenter plug-in
The XIV grid architecture and advanced caching algorithms keep the
● VAAI support that leverages VMware’s typical random I/O produced by VMware hosts away from the spindles.
best storage practices Balanced XIV resource utilization helps ensure high performance that is
● Monitoring and policy-based storage
stubbornly consistent and predictable, without manual or automated
deployment with a VASA provider
● Automated, reliable storage failover maintenance.
with the XIV adapter for SRM
Game-changing ease of management
The single-tier XIV design performs powerful automated load-balancing,
eliminating the possibility of hotspots. With XIV Gen3, simple
host-oriented I/O sharing control can ensure consistent quality of service.
XIV features a simple, superior user interface—the same interface that’s
now a standard for the IBM storage portfolio. Flexibility gains new mean-
ing, with the IBM XIV Mobile Dashboard delivering up-to-the-minute
XIV monitoring virtually anywhere, anytime via the Apple iPad or
iPhone.
Consolidation and host performance
XIV support for VAAI (VMware APIs for Array Integration) significantly
increases vSphere’s consolidation capabilities. It allows customers to easily
apply VMware best storage practices by offloading storage tasks to XIV,
helping eliminate unnecessary VM lockdown (caused by VMFS-level
SCSI reservation contention, which VAAI resolves).
Storage visibility and automation
The IBM Management Console for VMware vCenter (vCenter plug-in) gives
VMware administrators the ability to monitor storage easily from within
vCenter. The plug-in provides comprehensive detailed XIV LUN and
pool information down to the status of mirrors and snapshots, with a
choice of VM, host, cluster, datacenter and datastore contexts.

2. The IBM Storage Provider for VMware VASA (VMware APIs for Storage Top-tier IBM-VMware partnership
Awareness) enables vSphere to monitor and automate XIV storage- As a trusted VMware Technology Alliance Partner,
related operations. The XIV VASA provider delivers information about IBM offers one of the world’s leading comprehensive
storage topology, capabilities and state, as well as events and alerts. suites of differentiating solutions for VMware users.
IBM, a longstanding VMware collaborator, is one of
Self-service storage provisioning the few vendors co-developing storage integration
The IBM vCenter plug-in provides an option for pool-level, storage- with the next version of VMware. XIV storage
administrator-controlled delegation of storage provisioning tasks to system series is used at the VMware Reference
VMware administrators. Working within vCenter, the VMware adminis- Architecture Lab, contributing to the development,
trator can easily create, map and modify XIV LUNs on demand—either testing and release of progressive VMware features
regularly or thinly provisioned—limited only by the capacity allocated via and robust IBM XIV storage solutions.
the delegated pools. The storage administrator is freed from ad hoc
provisioning, and benefits from more realistic storage consumption Optimal virtualization, real
tracking and more accurate capacity planning. benefits
With XIV storage, VMware customers gain a power-
Failover ful, strikingly easy-to-manage storage complement to
The XIV Adapter for VMware vCenter SRM enables VMware administra- the VMware environment—with consistent high
tors to automate XIV failover in sync with VMware Site Recovery performance and low TCO.
Manager failover.
For more information
Backup and hardware snapshots To learn more about IBM XIV and VMware, please
The IBM Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy® Manager (FCM) vCenter plug-in contact your IBM marketing representative or
provides scheduled XIV datastore-level hardware snapshots. In addition, IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website:
when combined with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), the snapshots ibm.com/storage/disk/xiv
can be used to back up and restore individual VMs and virtual volumes,
or files within a virtual volume.
VMware vCloud deployments
For cloud deployments that demand a pre-specified reliable level of serv-
ice on a large scale, XIV storage is an ideal, highly-dependable, low-risk,
low-TCO choice. XIV helps deliver hotspot-free consistent high
performance, host-oriented QoS and simple provisioning.
Data
Protection © Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
Storage Plug-in
Management
Tivoli
Route 100
Plug-in
FlashCopy Somers, NY 10589
XIV Manager
Produced in the United States of America
.Net SaaS Windows Linux J2EE Desktop App January 2012
Application
Availability Security Scalability
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, FlashCopy, Tivoli and XIV are
vServices
trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in
VMware VMware Infrastructure the United States, other countries or both. If these and other
vCenter Virtual Datacenter OS from VMware
IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence
Infrastructure Cloud
in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these
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symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks
owned by IBM at the time this information was published.
Site Recovery
Manager
Such trademarks may also be registered or common law
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trademarks in other countries. A current list of
IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and
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Replication
VASA VADP VAAI trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
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IBM XIV integration points with the VMware Infrastructure
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