Private cloud storage offerings: IBM XIV Storage System

About cloud computing, the industry does not currently have a unified definition of the standard, IBM Power product director Li Hong said in an interview, cloud computing represents two aspects: one is to represent it technology, the second (and more important) is to represent a business model, that is, on demand to submit IT services business model. Therefore, as long as the need for flexible to provide to end users of the IT services required, it can be called cloud computing. Cloud storage, as one of the services in cloud computing, naturally conforms to the above description.

Cloud storage, whether it is cloud computing, although there is no precise standard, but it is already considered to be the future of IT development trend, then it is necessary to solve the current enterprise face a series of problems. Regardless of how the cloud storage is defined, it ultimately does not revolve around the storage infrastructure, but it is also necessary to address the storage performance challenges the enterprise currently faces, as well as the security challenges of massive data. XIV is an important product in the IBM Cloud strategy, so how does XIV address these issues?

IBM XIV Storage systems in previous lives

XIV originally originated in an Israeli company with the same name, the founder of Mossi Janai (Moshe Yanai), a former CTO at EMC, who was responsible for the development of the Symentrix DMX system during EMC's work, with the title of EMC "the father of high-end Symentrix", Mossi Janai, who has been engaged in the research and development of traditional storage systems, has a deep understanding of traditional storage architectures and is familiar with the bottleneck of traditional storage system architecture.

IBM XIV Storage System

Mossi Janai, after leaving EMC, has created XIV and a unique Nextra system solution that makes these X86 nodes a clustered array system through a unique caching algorithm using standard devices such as the relatively lower cost of Intel processors and SATA drives. Nextra is said to provide higher performance levels than Fibre Channel (FC) storage systems. Since XIV was acquired by IBM in 2007, Nextra has also been integrated into IBM's storage product line, and has been tasked with IBM's "critical" high-end storage market with IBM's existing storage products DS8000.

XIV's unique "grid" architecture with scale-out horizontal scalability and a unique way of data protection--pseudorandom algorithms--make IBM's expectations. IBM believes that the unique technical advantages of XIV are extremely adaptable to the requirements of the cloud storage environment, and the workload of the application environment, so XIV is also considered as a "cloud" future storage architecture.

The current XIV has been upgraded to a third generation product, its internal architecture still follows XIV's unique, fully-grid architecture, but it upgrades hardware and software, upgrades the original internal transmission link Gigabit Ethernet to InfiniBand, and the difference between InfiniBand and Ethernet , in the 2012 database technology conference, Alipay senior database architect Dong has provided a set of data as a contrast, of which InfiniBand storage channel delay in 1-3μs, and Gigabit Ethernet delay in 10-50μs, the gap between the two can be imagined. XIV upgrades to InfiniBand can significantly increase its data throughput and reduce latency.

And XIV upgrades the CPU and memory, the host interface from the original 4Gb fiber transition to 8Gb fiber, and in order to meet the user's higher storage performance requirements, IBM is expected to join the "SSD Caching" option in the future. At the same time, because the CPU and memory are upgraded to a higher level, its computing power significantly increased, in a unit time to handle more data, IBM also seems to consider in future XIV to add scale-up vertical expansion capabilities to form a scale-out+scale-up storage architecture.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)