IBM announced Wednesday that it acquired privately held storage technology company XIV. Based in Tel Aviv, XIV’s second-generation storage technology offers high-end features such as unlimited snapshots, I/O load-balancing and automatic configuration that can be deployed on inexpensive commodity hardware. “This is about IBM further strengthening its infrastructure portfolio,” VP of mergers and acquisitions at IBM System Storage Daniel Powers said. XIV's NEXTRA architecture can scale dynamically, heal itself in the event of failure and self-tune for optimum performance, an IBM spokesperson said. While IBM did not disclose financial terms, Israeli media reported that IBM paid up to $350 million.