IBM Steps Out of the Shadows With XIV

IBMs somewhat strange rollout of its XIV clustering technology has left many people scratching their heads about the vendor’s long-term grid roadmap.

After acquiring XIV for a rumored $350 million earlier this year, IBM has maintained pretty much radio silence about its plans for the little-known Israeli startup.

Then, last week, IBM finally brought a rebranded version of XIV’s Nextra block storage system out of the shadows, albeit in a note that appeared on the IBM Website.

In an era when vendors are desperate to get any shred of attention from customers (and journalists), at least one analyst was surprised by IBM’s ultra-soft launch.

”I find the whole thing a bit odd,” wrote Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research, in an email to Byte and Switch. “Given the amount of noise the company initially made about the XIV acquisition you’d think someone in the company would realize that going out the gate so modestly would attract attention.”The XIV technology is viewed as the cornerstone of the vendor’s efforts to tackle emerging (and lucrative) markets such as Web 2.0 and digital media, which may have prompted the firm to simply push the technology out under the media radar.

”It may have simply been a matter of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’,” added King. “IBM is pressing forward aggressively with its cloud computing strategy, and since XIV was positioned (in April) as a critical piece of the company’s iDataPlex solutions for Web 2.0 they may have simply decided they needed to get XIV systems out in the market.”

At this stage, the XIV hardware and software is hardly the finished article, something which IBM itself acknowledges on its Website:

In a "statement of general direction," the vendor says that it eventually intends to provide "best practice configuration guidance, change management, asset awareness, capacity utilization, performance trending, and operational reporting capabilities" via its TotalStorage Productivity Center software.

In addition, the vendor is looking to provide single sign-on capabilities for many IBM devices, including the XIV Storage System and storage software applications that “enable the administrator to use a single set of secure credentials to authenticate across all products via a single centralized point-of-control.”In the second half of this year, IBM will also add support for XIV as a disk system managed by its SAN Volume Controller.

”This additional support will provide connectivity for XIV systems to the very broad range of operating system environments supported by SVC,” it said, on the IBM Website. “This statement of direction is based on Tivoli's current development plans and is subject to change without prior notice."

The XIV is nonetheless somewhat cloaked in secrecy. IBM, for example, has not yet released any pricing information, nor did the vendor respond to a request for comment on its XIV roadmap when contacted by Byte & Switch earlier today.

Such is the growing popularity of cloud computing, though, that this may not even matter, according to Pund-IT’s King.

”Though it looks inelegant, I’m not sure that proceeding in such a fashion will hurt the company over the long term,” he wrote in his note today. “The market for commercial cloud computing is still developing, so IBM still has time to deliver on its XIV promises - however, I expect that before customers commit to XIV solutions they will want to know specifically when IBM plans to make more fully-enabled systems available.”If there is anyone out there kicking the tires on this pseudo-secret technology then we would love to hear from them, because it’s not clear that IBM will be opening up on this technology anytime soon.

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