Over the past few months there's been a lot of focus and marketing on the part of IBM about it's latest storage subsystem, the "XIV". Everyone's been going on about the performance or the architecture, or how it takes commodity parts and uses them in supposedly clever ways, evangelising until they're all IBM blue in the face. I find XIV an interesting concept but it's still too early in the product's development for XIV to really show its strengths as a flexible, versatile storage platform.

However there is another element to XIV that's really being overlooked by all this hype. It's nothing to do with the performance, availability, or even the cost of the unit. It's the XIV's GUI.

Maybe I've been dealing with IBM software too long, or buried in amongst command lines, but I can't help but be impressed with the simplicity and visual candy that is the XIV GUI. If it's green it's good, if it's red it's bad. Want to see utilisation of each unit, it's right there on the main screen. Want to assign a host volume, click on the disk icon ans specify how big a disk you want to present to which host. Want to connect something to a port on the back, it shows an actual picture of the back of the machine and highlights the port for you. It's intuitive,  simplistic, and yet comprehensive enough to do everything you need to do with the unit.

When buying storage people normally consider performance versus cost. Yet in the current market where everyone wants flexibility and virtualisation,  simplicity and ease of management are increasingly important priorities. This is especially true for large estates where you've got multi-vendor products with just as many different interfaces associated with them. Point, click, I want a volume this big for this host, is it broken... This should be all you should ever need to do with storage devices, not re-learn an interface each time trying to find some obscured option. This simplistic visual approach to management is something XIV excels in, and one that I hope IBM learns from.