As a further takeaway Anix stated that the configuration work of the XIV during the Proof of Concept  was very simple, taking minutes to complete – “far quicker then using the existing EMC and IBM infrastructure ”

Today I spoke to a UK based Infrastructure Consultancy Anix (now part of ACS) about an XIV storage solution they have just sold and delivered to a European financial services organization. The business requirement was to deliver a low cost, high performance storage solution to run an existing banking application with a large number of client record. The application required regular overnight batch processing runs and this was becoming problematic as the batch was beginning to impinge on the normal business day.  Although the application was relatively small in size, being just 5TB of database, the read and write intensity levels were extreme during batch runs.

To exacerbate the problem there was an expectation of significant growth in the number of records and that this would cause significant additional running time for the batch. The initial view was that the major bottleneck was in the IBM DS4800 mid-tier disk unit and this proved to be the case.

Some like-for-like performance testing was done with an EMC Clariion 380 and this proved not to fix the problem, in fact some of the batch runs took longer to run.

Anix recommended that the client consider the XIV solution because of the products capability of delivering high IO performance with low costs hardware. IBM pulled together a performance testing lab at the Hursley facility, mirroring the client’s hardware setup and were able to demonstrate dramatic performance improvements of between 25% and 50% shorter end-to-end batch runs.