The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications. It can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.

Today, as information continues to grow dramatically, SMBs are looking to control costs while also responding to the changing business environment. The new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Entry Edition helps SMBs manage that growth and improve the return on their storage investments while also helping simplify operations. SVC Entry Edition is built on more affordable hardware intended specifically to run the new SVC Entry Edition software which delivers the same rich functional capabilities as the regular SVC software.

As a result, IBM Business Partners already familiar with SVC will immediately be ready to support clients using SVC Entry Edition. SVC Entry Edition is licensed by the number of disk drives virtualized rather than by terabyte to make it more accessible and affordable. With this new type of licensing, IBM Business Partners can easily package new disk storage and SVC together to deliver complete storage solutions to clients.

Since its introduction in 2003, IBM has shipped over 14,000 SVC engines running in more than 4600 SVC systems. Complementing the announcement today of SVC Entry Edition, IBM has accomplished a new world record SPC disk-based benchmark that demonstrates the extraordinary scalability of SVC and continues IBM's leadership in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. The new benchmark not only beats the previous SVC measurement but does so with IBM's new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk thin provisioning technology enabled. The new SPC-1 benchmark of SVC running with IBM DS4700 disk supports 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS per second.

IBM is also announcing the interoperability of SVC with the new IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM System Storage DS5000 and the IBM System z/VSE. New interoperability support for SVC also includes Microsoft Hyper-V, HDS Universal Storage Platform and HP XP20000/XP24000.