For us, the XIV is pretty much set-it-and-forget-it storage. We use it behind the SAN volume controller. Having presented that storage to the SAN, we find that the latency is very predictable, the capacity is excellent and the reliability is fabulous. I have been very happy with the XIVs we have here. We have had them for about three years and (KNOCK KNOCK) they have yet to fail a single drive (I think this might be because the system is optimized to use RAM, “flash assist” (800G flash unit per XIV shelf), and 4G disk drives for the things that each do best).

IBM XIV's most valuable features are NVME, especially when it comes to de-duplication, compression, and responsiveness.

No-license-required policy, unlike others where you need a license for everything. Just pay once and forget about licenses.

Data availability: As it spreads, a chuck of 1MB across the board means using all available spindles on the backend.

Implementing Remote mirroring and local Snaps is very easy. The ROW (Redirect-On-Write) of Snaps has no impact on production data.

Ease of operation. Hands down, this is the easiest storage platform on the market to manage. It's essentially a fire-and-forget sort of solution. In our situation, we have these behind-the-scenes storage brokers (SVC), so we really never touch them at all, except for having support do code updates.