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In short, a thorough TCO assessment needs to take into account the cost of:
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Buying, implementing, running, cooling, and expanding the system
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Managing, integrating, and testing the system
Ensuring the system's reliability and availability
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Downtime caused by routine maintenance or unexpected equipment failure
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Savings opportunities lost during the time it takes the system to integrate newly
available, cost-reducing technologies
Software licensing – at time of purchase and upon each capacity increase
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®
The IBM XIV
Storage System has been architected to address all these cost issues. This
paper looks at the true total cost of owning an enterprise-class storage system and the
XIV system's winning, truly cost-reducing approach.
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It should be stated that it is inaccurate and even impractical to compare overall cost of
the XIV system with other storage systems using all VHDSR drives or current-
generation enterprise-class systems using a significant number of 1 TB drives. This is
because these systems, unlike IBM XIV, do not use 1 TB drives for tier 1 or even
tier 2 storage; rather, for archiving and other needs that do not require high
performance or high reliability. The XIV system provides enterprise-class performance
and reliability for all data at all times. In short, the quality of the storage is different.
It goes without saying that the huge cost advantage resulting from XIV ease of
management and software features is relevant in any comparison.
IBM XIV: Designed for Low TCO
Architected to deliver high reliability and performance at exceptionally low TCO, the IBM
XIV Storage System is:
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A fully virtualized, self-managed, self-healing system that balances load perfectly
at all times, optimizing capacity use and minimizing human intervention and error
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Complete with a built-in features set, including differential snapshots, remote
mirroring, and thin provisioning
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Easily managed through a simple graphical user interface (GUI) that minimizes
storage management overhead
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Built entirely of standard components, including low-cost, very high density slower
rotation disks (VHDSR)
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Fully hardware redundant, lowering risk of failure to negligible levels and enabling
disks to be added and replaced on the fly without a performance hit or downtime
►
A single-tier platform based on a grid architecture, for easy scaling
Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
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TCO Reinvented
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