Abtech Systems Offers IBM XIV

Abtech Systems, a provider of enterprise technology solutions, has teamed with IBM Corp. to offer IBM’s XIV line of high-end storage arrays.

IBM’s XIV family of storage arrays are built from industry-standard off-the-shelf hardware components, and include three different tiers of storage inside the box so customers can migrate data based on price and performance requirements. The IBM XIV Storage System was designed to handle today’s diverse mix of information – from traditional applications to Web 2.0 services as well as harness the high capacity and cost benefits of SATA drives.  The solution employs a storage architecture that will provide Abtech customers with better more reliability and greater functionality, while offering improvements in ease of storage and exceptionally low total cost of ownership (TCO).

According to Abtech, availability and reliability are critical to enterprises with high storage demands. IBM has addressed this need in its XIV family through a redundancy scheme that enables automated self healing with exceptionally fast rebuild times.  In addition a more functional approach to software includes snapshot capability, thin provisioning, and remote mirroring – all of which help to protect business data from unexpected outages and costly downloads.

With the IBM XIV Storage System, Abtech can deploy an information infrastructure that is reliable, versatile and available while offering improvements in storage management, provisioning and improved asset utilization. These reasons may explain why the XIV solution has become one of IBM’s fastest-growing product lines, with sales growing from $5 million to $280 million in 2009.

“The combination of hardware and software has enabled Abtech to offer a solid grid-based architecture that provide an exceptionally easy to use, high performance, scalable, reliable enterprise disk system for UNIX, Linux, Windows, and other supported distributed open server platforms,“ said Bob Russell, President of Abtech Systems.

“IBM’s XIV reduces complexity in enterprise storage while keeping pace with midrange to high-end disk capacity demands.  This solution is a good fit for clients who want to be able to grow capacity without managing multiple tiers of storage,” said Russell.

Highlights of Abtech’s IBM XIV solution include:

• High-end disk storage architecture eliminates the complexity of administration and management of tiered storage and information lifecycle management.
• Near-instantaneous snapshots provide point-in-time copies of data, which consume storage capacity only per changes while maintaining high performance.
• System virtualization that greatly simplifies IT operations and optimizes performance through automatic distribution of data across system resources.
• High reliability through a self-healing function, which can rebuild a 1 TB disk drive within 30 minutes or less.
• Intuitive user interface and system virtualization to simplify storage configuration and management.
• Built-in ‘thin provisioning’ to help reduce direct and indirect costs by allowing users to install capacity only for data actually written, and gradually grow it over time with minimal management effort.
• Green Technology – Greener power usage enabled through the use of large capacity SATA drives and optimized use of disk capacity, resulting in outstanding power consumption efficiency per TB, without compromising performance.
• Scalability – Organizations can start small and add capacity as needed with no need to reconfigure.

Abtech offers the IBM XIV Storage Systems as a Certified Partner, which authorizes Abtech to sell the solution to customers throughout its network of 18 service offices across the U.S. Abtech offers 7x24x365 support and a full compliment of maintenance and support services, which includes hardware and software maintenance, on site or remote consulting, disaster recovery, data center relocation, training, performance analyses, and capacity planning.