IBM buys XIV storage company

By Stephen Withers
Thursday, 03 January 2008 02:37

Strategy

IBM has acquired XIV, a privately-held Israel-based storage company for an undisclosed sum.

According to Israeli publication Globes Online, the price may have been in the $US300-$350 million range. Globes also notes that XIV was built on a total investment of only $US3 million since its formation in 2002.

XIV's flagship product is Nextra, a single-architecture SAN system said to be capable of maintaining consistently high performance, high reliability with low rebuild times, simplified management, unlimited snapshots, remote mirroring, and low total cost of ownership (achieved in part by only allocating storage space when it is actually needed for data, not merely to provide a logical volume of a certain size).

The company has shipped more than four petabytes of capacity to its customers in two years.

"The acquisition of XIV will further strengthen the IBM infrastructure portfolio long term and put IBM in the best position to address emerging storage opportunities like Web 2.0 applications, digital archives and digital media," said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage.

"The ability for almost anyone to create digital content at any time has accelerated the need for a whole new way of applying infrastructure solutions to the new world of digital information. IBM's goal is to provide the leading technologies and solutions at every layer of the data center - storage, servers, software and services - to address these new realities IT customers face."

The company and its technologies and employees will become part of the IBM System Storage business unit.

"We are pleased to become a significant part of the IBM family, allowing for our unique storage architecture, our engineers and our storage industry experience to be part of IBM's overall storage business," said XIV chairman Moshe Yanai. During the 1990s, Yanai was involved in the development of EMC's Symmetrix and DMX storage products. He is also the main investor in XIV.

"We believe the level of technological innovation achieved by our development team is unparalleled in the storage industry. Combining our storage architectural advancements with IBM's world-wide research, sales, service, manufacturing, and distribution capabilities will provide us with the ability to have these technologies tackle the emerging Web 2.0 technology needs and reach every corner of the world," he added.