XIV Systems: An Israeli Revolution in the Information Age
Product: Advanced Data Storage Systems Company: XIV, later IBM Start of Development: 2002
The amount of information is growing at a dizzying speed: more information exists in the world every two years than in all the years previous. This poses a serious problem for companies and large organizations: while information doubles, and with it the required data speed and capacity, the funds allocated to the field of storage have lagged behind. As a result, the organizational storage system has difficulty in performing basic functions such as receiving orders, managing stockpiles, creating backup, accessing the database etc.
In 2002, five graduates of the IDF 'Talpiot' program founded a company that focused on calculations related to cache memory.
The use of cache memory enables the quick fetching of data instead of relying on the original source that is relatively slow.
The company’s team, together with other entrepreneurs, realized that many data storage systems need to use expensive components in order to supply data at the required speed, in turn incurring high costs and inefficiency The challenge was to develop a cheap, fast and reliable storage system. By the end of the process, the team had succeeded in designing a data storage product that uses a single storage level, distributes the data symmetrically between all its components, was especially low-cost, provides extremely good performance, and that automatically "heals" itself upon malfunction.
In 2005, XIV began marketing a product named 'Nextra'. The IBM Corporation identified its potential and purchased the company in 2008 with the aim of leveraging the technology to benefit organizations by providing fast data recall, quick access to databases and lower purchase and operational costs.
IBM's XIV products were a revolution for customers in both the public and private sectors. Governments, banks, hospitals, technology companies – in fact almost every type of company worldwide – can all offer faster and better services thanks to XIV.
Following the acquisition, an IBM development laboratory was established in Tel Aviv and it is leading the product’s design and further innovations such as the IBM FlashSystem A9000/R.
Hundreds of employees are exporting the message that dictates the global data storage market.
Thousands of XIV systems have been sold to date in 150 countries. The vast amount of data stored on the products is estimated in exabytes (108). The direct and indirect revenues from the product stand at hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
