IBM Systems and TechnologyThought Leadership White Paper

September 2011

Driving down enterprise storage TCOwith the IBM XIV Storage SystemArchitecture and simplified management diminish ownership costs

2 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

Hardware management3%

Backup/restore23%

Environmentals18%

Acquisition20%

Downtime18%

Administration18%

IntroductionA high-end storage system’s total cost of ownership (TCO)includes more outlays than the obvious ones of box price andcapacity. Taking a holistic look at the factors impacting IT budgets over a storage system’s lifetime yields an accurate TCOassessment and, ultimately, a more informed buying decision.

The chart below shows a full set of storage cost elements andtheir relative impact on a system’s overall cost.

Figure 1: Typical storage cost factors

Given the various cost factors involved, it is evident that a thor-ough TCO assessment should take into account the cost of:

! Buying, implementing, running, cooling and expanding thesystem.

! Managing, integrating and testing the system.! Ensuring the system’s reliability and availability. ! Incurring downtime caused by routine maintenance or

unexpected equipment failure.! Being locked in to a system that uses proprietary components. ! Licensing software at time of purchase and upon each capacity

increase.

The IBM® XIV® Storage System series is designed to addresseach of the above cost issues. An independent study by ITG hasfound that XIV storage can save an organization 69 percent onTCO over a three year period.1 This paper explains how theXIV system’s unique architecture and approach to storage enableit to accomplish this feat.

3IBM Systems and Technology

The XIV Storage System: Designed for low TCODesigned to deliver high performance and reliability at excep-tionally low TCO, the IBM XIV Storage System series is:

! Priced in a simple manner that is based on cost per terabyte,without additional costs for software features such as differen-tial snapshots, remote mirroring and thin provisioning.

! A fully virtualized, self-managed, self-healing system that automatically balances loads at all times, optimizing capacityuse and minimizing human intervention and error.

! Easily managed through a simple graphical user interface(GUI) that minimizes storage management overhead.

! Built entirely of state-of-the-art, yet standard, cost-effectivecomponents that can significantly reduce power consumption.

! Fully hardware-redundant, lowering risk of failure to negligi-ble levels and enabling disks to be added and replaced on thefly without a performance hit or downtime.

! A single-tier platform based on a grid architecture, eliminatingthe need to tune and configure the system for each workloadand reducing management costs.

The XIV system is designed to comprehensively address eachstorage TCO factor, whereas other systems typically addressonly a few elements, at most. The chart on the next page illus-trates how the XIV system addresses cost factors to dramaticallyreduce TCO.

XIV Storage System: Reducing acquisitioncostsThe IBM XIV Storage System is designed to be cost-efficient inaspects related to system acquisition, while delivering consistent,predictable high performance by its:

! Single-tier architecture, which supports all types of storagein one environment and makes scaling easy.

! Use of off-the-shelf components, making customized hard-ware unnecessary and allowing the integration of newer, state-of-the-art hardware as it becomes available and cost-effective.

! Innovative use of highly economical disk drives, offeringexcellent capacity-for-cost value while meeting enterprise performance standards.

! Built-in thin provisioning, which allows the acquisition andinstallation of additional capacity to be delayed until needed.This makes it possible to take full advantage of future hard-ware and price-point improvements not currently available.

! Automatic load-balancing, self-healing capability and otherarchitectural features that provide Tier-1 enterprise-level performance while using lower priced disk drives and, ulti-mately, optimizing usable capacity compared to traditionalarchitectures.

! Simple price per terabyte and inclusion of a rich set of software features such as snapshots, remote mirroring andthin provisioning that are available for all system capacities.

4 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

Figure 2: XIV Storage System benefits by TCO category

Hardware managementAutomatic hardware monitoringQuick disk rebuild

Backup/restoreSnapshots with no performance impactDifferential snapshotsVSS supportSimple migrationConsistency groups

AcquisitionSingle-tier architectureCommodity hardwareLower hardware costsJust-in-time purchasingEfficient thin provisioningOptimal capacity useAll key aspects scalableRobust software features includedat no extra cost

EnvironmentalsReduced power and coolingMinimized space footprint

AdministrationFast deployment and migrationSimplified storage managementEasy monitoringThin provisioning and spacereclamationSelf-tuningHot, non-disruptive upgradeTransparent scalingwith no hidden costs

DowntimeLess hardware to failIntegral UPSLess human intervention,averting human errorsRapid self-healing and scrubbingAll components redundantFree and flexible volume replication

5IBM Systems and Technology

Single-tier architectureMost IT centers today use information life cycle management(ILM) and similar practices to cut costs. These efforts involvemultitiering, adding a substantial degree of complexity and costto system management. A multitier storage solution typicallyincludes a number of different architectures, each requiring adifferent kind of expertise. Moving the data between tiersrequires effort and planning and involves hardware and operat-ing expenses for each tier. As each environment grows at its own pace, equipment must be added to one tier or another.Since this growth is typically unpredictable, acquisitions areoften not cost-efficient.

The single-tier XIV architecture eliminates the complexity andcost of migrating data from tier to tier and maintaining differentarchitectures for different tiers. It also does away with the cost of using expensive hardware for higher tier data; in other words,XIV provides Tier-1 performance for data at Tier-2 costs. Assuch, XIV storage helps organizations curtail and minimizehardware costs while offering the ability to grow at any time, and only as much as needed.

Commodity hardwareTraditional enterprise-class storage systems are usually builtfrom proprietary hardware. This typically makes them costly dueto the huge investment in their development and version testing.More importantly, the use of proprietary components creates a built-in rigidity that makes such systems unable or slow tointegrate new technologies.

XIV minimizes costs and provides exceptional flexibility by treat-ing hardware as an interchangeable commodity. Built entirely of off-the-shelf hardware components, XIV storage is designedto integrate the latest disks, motherboards, CPUs, memory,interconnects and other components. This empowers organiza-tions to capitalize on market advances in capacity and cost whilemeeting their dynamic performance and budget requirements.

Very high density disk drivesEnterprise storage systems are traditionally configured withFibre Channel (FC) drives generally known for speed and relia-bility and, consequently, high cost. XIV storage, on the otherhand, uses only very high density drives that offer three primaryadvantages over FC drives: they cost less, they are more energyefficient and they offer more memory per physical footprint.

6 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

The XIV system’s combination of high density drives with innovative caching, load balancing, massive parallelism andadvanced algorithms provides Tier-1 performance, reliability and availability.

The IBM XIV performance white paper provides more informa-tion on the XIV system’s high-end performance resulting fromthe use of commodity hardware such as very high density drives.

Built-in thin provisioningMost enterprise systems offer thin provisioning—the ability todefine a system’s logical capacity which is larger than its physicalcapacity—so as to defer physical capacity purchases. However, inmany systems this feature has been added to the existing archi-tecture, making it harder to manage and of limited scope.

The XIV Storage System provides thin provisioning as a corefeature of its design, managed at the simple click of a button.Organizations can leverage the system’s easy-to-manage thinprovisioning capability to significantly reduce capital and operating expenses. This allows the organization to postponecapacity purchases by acquiring physical capacity for only thetotal space actually written rather than the total space allocated.

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%Traditional Tier-1 system

Lostspace

Fullsnapshots

IBM XIV system

Thickprovisioning

Effectivecapacity

“ Drag-and-drop thin provisioning lets usdeliver new storage volumes while still on the phone with the user!”

—International stock exchange, Europe

Optimal capacity useIt is commonly recognized that a large amount of a storage system’s total storage capacity is not utilized. Whether economic times are good or bad, that is a troublesome scenario of capacity waste.

XIV storage is designed to optimize capacity use in many ways.These include self-management, ongoing space reclamation and powerful native features such as thin provisioning and differential snapshots, which save space as they are applied. TheXIV system is able to meet the same storage needs as traditionalsystems with many fewer net terabytes of capacity. This cantranslate into less spending on physical capacity; it also can mean fewer outlays resulting from a system that operates with-out hotspots and without system down-time or performancedegradation during maintenance or scaling.

Figure 3: Comparison of typical capacity utilization

7IBM Systems and Technology

Self-management: Core to the XIV system’s optimization of capacity use is its self-management of data. The system’s automated volume distribution mechanism optimizes the use of capacity across system disks at peak times and regardless of IT activities, application size or user demand. Its automatedapproach to volume distribution, including automated load balancing, avoids onerous and error-prone manual allocationtasks. The system also automatically performs space reclamation,further maximizing capacity use.

Differential snapshots (full backup volumes): XIV snapshottechnology uses a differential implementation, copying only thedata that differs between source and snapshot. This dramaticallyand efficiently minimizes the space otherwise consumed bycopies and keeps system performance unaffected.

In addition, XIV snapshot and replication mechanisms take therequired storage space from a single, general pool. Traditionalsystems typically require the allocation of separate storage poolsfor snapshots and replication. The downside to the traditionalapproach is that when the pools are from different tiers, sparespace is taken from all over the system, increasing the overheadneeded to track where the data resides.

Hotspot-free: XIV storage is fully virtualized, distributing dataautomatically and maintaining load balance at all times, withouthotspots. The lack of hotspots eliminates the need to reallocatevolumes to achieve specific performance requirements.

Hands-free scaling: Whenever new physical capacity is added,XIV storage automatically integrates the new capacity across thedisks and modules and swiftly redistributes the load to maintainperfect balance. For more information on IBM XIV volume distribution and load balancing, see the IBM XIV performancewhite paper.

Instant space reclamation (thin reclamation): Integrating tightlywith Symantec Storage Foundation and similar tools, XIV storage performs instant space reclamation automatically forNTFS or VxFS file systems and offers simple management forleveraging this capability to the fullest. The XIV system recog-nizes “zeroed out” space as not being in use; it releases any spacemarked by zeros into the general pool, thus reclaiming it. XIVmanagement tools enable administrators to easily zero out spaceno longer in use so that the system can automatically reclaim itand allow its reuse. This ability, inherent to the XIV architec-ture, allows the system to reclaim more space than traditionalstorage systems can, thus making its capacity utilization superior.

More information on the benefits of thin reclamation is availablein the IBM XIV thin reclamation white paper

8 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

Simple pricingSimplicity is a key virtue of XIV storage; this simplicity appliesto pricing, as well. Buying an XIV system is a simple matter ofspecifying the desired capacity.

The XIV Storage System takes a bundled approach to features,with every system including the following software functionalitybuilt-in, at no extra charge:

! Thousands of snapshots! Remote mirroring! Storage management! Thin provisioning! Self-tuning! Host attachment kits (HAKs)! Data migration! Special host features, such as MS VSS and SCOM support! Native multipath support of the host operating system! QoS Performance Classes! Performance monitoring! Consistency groups

Not charging software license fees for this rich set of function-ally differentiates XIV storage from the vast majority of systemson the market. Most traditional Tier-1 storage systems havecomplex pricing models that, by nature, inflate system cost and complicate attempts to assess true TCO. Such enterprisestorage pricing schemes commonly involve itemized hardwareand infrastructure costs, itemized license fees for software features—including for their initial purchase, upon capacityincrease and annual license renewals—as well as other softwarefees for version compatibility.

Moreover, the XIV system’s native self-healing and load balanc-ing mechanisms spare or minimize the need to purchase periph-eral software enhancers, such as performance optimization tools.

“ The 50 percent reduction in utilized capacityand lack of additional licensing costs throughthe mirrored infrastructure meant we also had an impressively low total cost of ownership to look forward to.”

—Banking institution, Europe

9IBM Systems and Technology

XIV Storage System: Loweringenvironmental costsThe IBM XIV Storage System is an extremely “green,” environ-mentally advantageous system, offering upfront and ongoingsavings in power, cooling and floor space. These savings are sosubstantial that they alone can bring the TCO of XIV storagelower than that of a comparable system.

Power and cooling consumptionThe XIV Storage System can offer power and cooling savings of more than 65 percent over comparable high-end enterprisesystems.2 There are two primary reasons for substantially lowerpower consumption:

! Due to its use of high density drives and inherent capacityoptimization, XIV storage requires substantially fewer drivesfor a given gross capacity when compared to traditional systems.

! High density disks consume less power and emit less heat thandisks used by traditional storage systems.

The Appendix of this white paper contains formulas that can be used to calculate the energy saved by XIV storage in a givenscenario. For more information on how XIV reduces powerusage, see the IBM XIV power consumption white paper.

“ We’ve shrunk our floor footprint from 10 tiles down to two… we’re seeing a greatreduction in cooling and power consumption.”

—Leading regional medical center, US

Floor spaceHigh density drives offer capacities that are greater than those of disks used by competing systems. This allows XIV customersto consolidate and use significantly fewer floor tiles for a givencapacity; on a rack level, XIV systems can provide 161 TB ofcapacity in the same physical space that competing systems offer40 or 80 TB.

The Appendix to this white paper provides formulas for calculating the floor space savings provided by XIV storage in a given scenario.

Savings may also accrue by avoiding costs associated with IT facility renovations required to accommodate more physicalstorage and the related organizational disruption that would take place. While these indirect savings are often overlookedand/or underestimated, the simple fact is that if physical space is not available, a data center must expand or be relocated.

XIV Storage System: Loweringadministration and management costs The XIV Storage System can dramatically reduce storage management effort and related costs by automating performancetuning and other traditionally manual management functions.This automation can simplify daily administrative tasks and offercapacity efficiencies that reduce the overall amount of physicalcapacity that needs to be managed. With the necessity of exten-sive training and fine tuning eliminated or reduced, the XIV system’s simplification of storage management brings furthercost reductions.

10 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

Less management overheadThe XIV Storage System is designed to manage itself as much as possible and be managed with minimal effort. Its easy andintuitive user interface is an outward reflection of a smart, efficient and well-structured architecture.

Easy, rapid deployment and migrationXIV storage obviates the traditional need to intensively plan the layout of application volumes on physical storage units. Its automated, optimized approach to volume distribution andload balancing can significantly reduce storage migration anddeployment time.

“ The XIV data migration was the mostimpressive aspect of the whole implementa-tion phase … the migration ran in the background, with no perceptible effect on the performance.”

—Large bank, South Africa

Simple-to-scale capacityAdding capacity with XIV storage is similarly seamless. The new capacity is available immediately, without the need to reconfigure and without performance degradation.

Ease of useThe XIV system’s highly intuitive GUI greatly simplifies day-to-day storage administration, enabling most tasks to be exe-cuted in just a few clicks. The result is a dramatic reduction inthe time required to, among other things, provision storage,

resize volumes, create storage pools and even take snapshots—inmost cases, a reduction from hours and days to a few minutes orless. Training to use the XIV system is also quick. Exceptionalease of use helps organizations reduce costs by making storageadministrators more productive and allowing them to focus onhigh value tasks.

Simple XIV GUI

The system’s ease of use, in fact, combines with XIV role-basedaccess and authorization to offer a new IT paradigm in whichany staff member, including one without special storage skills,can provision and manage storage. It is conceivable, for example,that database administrators might handle provisioning, withoutexternal assistance, controlling only those volumes they areauthorized to handle based on role. The XIV system’s ability to enable lesser skilled personnel to manage ongoing growth can translate into substantial savings in overall TCO.

The XIV Storage System’s interface allows managing up to 64 systems withthe ability to define groups.

11IBM Systems and Technology

Easy monitoringThe XIV Storage System dramatically simplifies the monitoringand maintenance of system health—including through alerts sentto select personnel via automated email, SMS and SNMP thatclearly identify a problem and its source. The result is a highlytransparent system with speedy mechanisms for easily and efficiently handling maintenance and issues as they arise.

XIV Storage System monitoring

System monitoring provides alerts and information that enable users to iden-tify a problem and its source.

Self-tuningThe XIV system automates performance tuning, removing thecomplexities of load balance, location of mirrored data and datadistribution. With XIV storage, consistent high performance isachieved without the need for labor-intensive manual tuning tomonitor, reconfigure or rebalance performance or disperse

hotspots. In addition, XIV storage maintains optimal performance, with no need for performance optimizing software products.

Single-tier platformXIV storage spares IT teams the administrative efforts otherwiserequired to support additional architectures or migrate data fromone tier to another in an attempt to keep up with changingneeds or trim storage costs.

Unified integrated platformsXIV storage provides certified, enterprise-proven, no-chargeintegrations and high levels of partner support across leadingplatforms, applications and storage productivity products. The ability to integrate with IBM Tivoli, VMware vCenter,Microsoft SCOM and Symantec CommandCentral, amongother management products, empowers users to monitor and manage storage end-to-end with a unified interface.

Views of virtualized pools and arrays

Used in a VMware vCenter environment, XIV storage provides visibility into virtualized pools and arrays

12 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

XIV Storage System: Reducing downtimecostsDowntime is expensive. The loss or lack of access to mission-critical data can harm an enterprise directly and indirectly. XIVstorage is designed to operate continuously over its installed life-time with no interruption to data access. It keeps data availabilitycontinuous and minimizes the extent and cost of downtimethrough redundant hardware, automated and proactive mainte-nance and efficient hardware repair with minimal administratorintervention.

Less failure to manageThrough ongoing automatic monitoring of hardware and data,XIV storage in most cases can enable detection of imminent failure in time to prevent data loss or data unavailability. Thesystem performs data scrubbing continuously, comparing datacopies and correcting inconsistencies quickly and efficiently.System components are redundant and constantly monitored to minimize downtime from physical failure. Upon detectingsigns of failure, the system creates a third copy of the data on theat-risk disk immediately, and it automatically alerts operationspersonnel. The system is designed for component replacementon the fly, without downtime or even a perceptible degradationin system performance.

Should a component fail without warning, the XIV system’srapid self-healing features can restore complete system redundancy in minutes, without disruption to vital enterprise functions.

Should a disk failure occur, the system can complete a diskrebuild in 60 minutes or less (for a 2 TB drive, with the systemat 100 percent utilization), with minimal impact on system service. The system is able to do this since all system disks

engage in the rebuild, keeping the burden on any one disk to theminimum. Furthermore, only the data actually written is rebuilt,making rebuild time proportional to actual written data.

In addition, online support is available through IBM 24!7 globalsupport and service, which can:

! Monitor customer system health! Alert customers regarding past or imminent issues! Offer immediate remote assistance to solve issues

Reduced intervention and human errorThe XIV Storage System can further reduce system downtimeby helping prevent human errors that could lead to equipmentor system failure. Its self-management of volumes can eliminatethe traditional need for manual configuration planning—a taskthat not only consumes much time, but often increases the riskof data unavailability or data loss due to human errors. Theautomatic self-healing feature, which returns the system to fulldata redundancy upon hardware failure, precludes the need torush to repair a failed component, avoiding the kind of humanerror that can take place when parts are replaced under pressureand at odd hours of the day. Furthermore, XIV storage calls formaintenance tasks to be performed only when the system is fullyredundant, thus helping to prevent data loss caused by humanerror during maintenance activities, such as removal of a work-ing disk rather than the faulty disk.

High availability and nondisruptive changesIn most enterprise storage systems, planned downtime for datamigration and maintenance is costly—and a major inconven-ience for the IT team and end users. Minimizing downtimeinvolves extensive planning. Multiple teams are involved to represent the interests of end users, management, vendors andservice personnel.

13IBM Systems and Technology

Negotiating downtime for maintenance is another inevitablesource of friction, as maintenance must compete with other,higher priority demands. In traditional systems, rolling out abusiness application may also require system downtime, withsimilar costs and conflicts.

The IBM XIV Storage System is designed and implemented to grow, shrink or change without the need to reconfigure orshut down the system at any time. The administrative headachesenumerated above have been significantly reduced or eliminatedthrough the XIV system’s single-tier, constantly balanced architecture.

The XIV architecture allows hardware components to be addedto or removed from a new or existing, operational XIV systemwithout downtime. XIV storage provides an easy and seamlessnondisruptive procedure for component changes with little management effort and no disruption. Upon any physical capacity change, the system automatically redistributes volume data, maintaining full system equilibrium.

The XIV Storage System’s built-in, redundant UPS units provide ongoing protection against data loss while increasingreliability by avoiding the wear and tear to electronic andelectromechanical parts caused by inevitable data surges. Bysparing its hardware parts undue exposure to fluctuating power,XIV storage essentially lengthens the lifespan of these parts, saving costs by bringing their shelf life closer to their theoreticallifespan.

Online code upgradesXIV storage allows hot code upgrades and patches within andoutside a code family. This eliminates the need to scheduledowntime, while ensuring ongoing access to application data.The capability also allows storage teams to proactively imple-ment critical fixes rather than wait for scheduled downtime windows, ensuring continuous availability and preventing costs resulting from escalation of issues left untreated.

XIV Storage System: Loweringbackup/restore costsWith traditional enterprise systems, backup and restoreprocesses are costly. Traditional backup processes involve the writing of full volumes of data onto additional storage space, including the copying of unused space that has never been written to.

The XIV Storage System handles backup by copying only theblocks of data that have actually been written to—it does notcopy zeroes. In contrast to the high rates of unused space inlegacy systems, the XIV approach greatly reduces the time andspace that backups require and, consequently, the costs involved.

In addition, XIV storage offers logical backup and low-costrecovery through thousands of snapshots. This innovative mechanism allows organizations to expand and fortify theirbackup practices without necessarily increasing their physicalcapacity needs.

XIV storage offers snapshots on demand, with no administrativeoverhead or perceptible degradation in system performance.Thousands of snapshots can significantly reduce storage

14 Driving down enterprise storage TCO with the IBM XIV Storage System

requirements, contributing further to the system’s low overallTCO. The efficiency of XIV snapshots and the ease of restoreenable the use of snapshots as a hot backup mechanism at almostno cost.

XIV Storage System: Proven TCO savingsin the fieldAnalysts have demonstrated that XIV ownership costs are69 percent lower than those of comparable systems.1 XIV customer savings echo analysts’ findings, and below are a few examples of how XIV storage has brought savings to organizations across various industries:

Cnam (Education; France): TCO cut by 60 percent—VideoDenbury (Chemicals and petroleum; US): Storage administrationdown by up to 80 percentLuxembourg Stock Exchange (Financial Services; Europe):TCO reduced by 70 percent—Video in English, Frenchand GermanBluewater Power (Energy and utilities; Canada): 60 to 70 percentreduction in storage provision and management time and 50 percent reduction in rack space

ConclusionA storage system’s total cost of operation is made up of a com-plex blend of obvious and less evident factors. It is critical to lookbeyond superficial TCO components, such as initial cost andpower, and consider the indirect factors that incur costs overtime. The IBM XIV Storage System is designed to reduce bothdirect and indirect costs, among other ways, by making storagesimple to deploy while keeping data protected from risk andmaintaining high availability.

Appendix: Cost savings formulasThe formulas below enable the calculation of environmental savings that can be realized through the use of the XIV Storagesystem. Examples are provided for Fibre Channel drives of dif-ferent capacities that are typically used by traditional storage systems, and in RAID-1 and RAID-5 (5+1) configurations. Tomake similar calculations for a RAID-6 (4+2) installation, simplyreplace the 0.8 coefficient by 0.75.

Floor space savingsWith higher density drives, XIV storage can meet the sameneeds as competing systems but with fewer drives. To determinethe savings in floor space that can result from using the XIV system’s high density drives, input values relevant to your storageoperation in the formulas below.

! To compare RAID-1 drives to XIV’s very high density drives,use the following formula:% savings in floor space = {1 - (your FC drive capacity) /(XIV system drive capacity)} * 100

For example: Assuming you are comparing your existing 450 GBdrives to the XIV system’s 2 TB (2000 GB) drives, the floorspace savings is calculated as follows:

% savings in floor space = {1 - (450) / (2000)} * 100 = 77.5%

! To compare RAID-5 drives to the XIV system’s very high density drives, use the following formula:% savings in floor space = {1 - 0.8(your FC drive capacity) / 0.5(XIV system drive capacity)} * 100

For example: Assuming you are comparing your existing RAID-5 300 GB drives to the XIV system’s 2 TB (2000 GB)drives, the floor space savings is calculated as follows:

% savings in floor space = {1 – 0.8*(300) / 0.5*(2000)} *100 = 76%

To calculate your actual savings, multiply the resulting percent-age by the real cost of the floor space currently used by yourstorage system.

Your potential savings may be even greater should your data center be at its physical limits. It should be noted that choosingXIV storage may allow renovations or relocation to a largerfacility to be delayed or avoided, saving the expense and disrup-tion of such a change.

Power and cooling savingsHigh density drives are more efficient to operate than FibreChannel drives. The XIV system’s ability to meet the same needs with fewer drives and through greater efficiency per drivecreates corresponding cost savings in power and cooling.

To determine potential power and cooling savings resulting fromreplacing your present drives with the XIV system’s very highdensity drives, use values relevant to your storage operation inthe formulas below.

! To compare RAID-1 drives to XIV’s drives, use the followingformula:% savings in power and cooling = {1 – 0.75 (your drivesize) / (XIV system drive size)} * 100

For example: Assuming you are comparing your existing 146 GBdrives to the XIV system’s 2 TB (1000 GB) drives, the powerand cooling savings are calculated as follows:

% savings in power and cooling = {1 – 0.75(146)/ (1000)}* 100 = 89%

! To compare RAID-5 drives to the XIV system’s very high density drives, use the following formula:% savings in power and cooling = {1 – 0.75 [0.8(yourdrive size)] / [0.5(the XIV system drive size)]} * 100

! To compare 450 GB RAID-5 drives to the XIV system’s 2 TB(2000 GB) drives, use the following formula:% savings in power and cooling = {1 – 0.75 * [0.8 * (450)] / [0.5 * 2000]} * 100 = 73%

As noted, to make similar calculations for a RAID-6 (4+2) array,simply replace the 0.8 coefficient in the formulas with 0.75.

Use your own figures to calculate your potential savings. Applythe percentage that you calculate to your data center’s currentutility bills to understand the significance that these savings canhave on your annual budget.

For more informationTo learn more about IBM XIV Storage Systems, please contactyour IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner orvisit ibm.com/systems/storage/disk/xiv

Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financingcan enable effective cash management, protection from technol-ogy obsolescence, improved total cost of ownership and returnon investment. Also, our Global Asset Recovery Services helpaddress environmental concerns with new, more energy-efficientsolutions. For more information on IBM Global Financing, visit:ibm.com/financing

15IBM Systems and Technology

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1 ITG, Cost/Benefit Case for IBM XIV Systems: Comparing Cost Structuresfor IBM XIV and EMC V-Max Systems, International Technology GroupSanta Cruz, California, July 2011

2 IBM Systems and Technology, Driving down power consumption with theIBM XIV Storage System, IBM, July 2011

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