IBM is going to introduce a cheaper and less powerful SAN Volume Controller (SVC) for small/medium business (SMB) customers.

The SVC sits in a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) fabric and combines all the drive arrays attached to that fabric into a single virtual pool of storage. It can also thin provision that storage so that applications think they have all the storage they need but actually given only as much as they need for written data plus a margin.

The SVC Entry Edition (SVC EE) has been produced after partner input and for partner sales in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries and other emerging markets and for partners in the US with customers resistant to the pricing of the full SVC.

It is an x86 1U rackmount server, like the existing SVC, but less powerful, having 50 per cent of the full SVC speed, and costing 40 per cent less at $29,500. The full SVC's software is priced on a per-terabyte basis and tiered to provide a volume discount up to a maximum of 3PB.

SVC EE software, with exactly the same functionality, including thin provisioning, will be priced on a different basis, costing $1,000 per disk drive virtualised, up to a maximum of 60 drives. With today's 1TB drives, IBM reckons this will provide up to 14TB of usable storage. A 3TB SVC EE will cost $32,500.

The full SVC now supports IBM's XIV storage, the DS5000, System z/VSE, HDS USP and HP's XP20000 and 24000 plus it interoperates with Hyper-V. It has also recorded a record SPC-1 benchmark with thin provisioning turned on of 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS.

SVC EE will be available on November 21st.

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