IBM has announced two new storage products - upper
midrange and high-end disc arrays designed for ease of use and
lower cost.
The DS6000 and DS8000 feature higher physical storage
capacities, a modular architecture, and additional visualisation
technology, all in systems considerably smaller than previous
versions.
The high-end disc array DS8000 features advanced 64-bit Power5
processing capabilities and will be available in two-way and
four-way controller configurations, with eight-way and 12-way
versions planned for the future.
The DS8000 will connect to other suppliers' storage systems and
uses San Volume Controller (SVC) software for visualisation.
The DS6000 is built on IBM's Power4 processor and comes in a 3U
cabinet configuration that supports 16 drives and 13 expansion
drawers. It can support as much as 67TBytes of storage and 4GBytes
of cache.
"The announcements we are making today are going to change the
way the market looks, and four years from now things will look
[drastically] different," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice-president
of systems and technology group.
Zeitler added that he thinks the storage market will shift from
suppliers being in control to one in which the customers hold the
power.
"This is not IBM taking the storage proposition to market, this
is IBM and a lot of partners," Zeitler said. "It is not IBM
standing alone that will bring choices to market."
IBM customer Bob Venable, enterprise systems manager at Blue
Cross Blue Shield explained that his company's storage has grown by
a factor of 10 in the past four years, all while reducing the staff
that manage storage.
"Soft [logical partitioning] is the key," Venable said. "We've
taken it down from the mainframe to Unix."
Venable plans to also partition on Windows and Linux systems,
but has not done so yet.
According to a research report from PacificCrest, the new
offerings should help IBM, particularly in the midrange. The
report said that the DS6000 "will extend some of IBM's high-end
functionality into the fast-growing midrange storage market
segment".
The two systems compete with systems from EMC and Hitachi Data
Systems. The DS8000 competes with EMC's Symmetrix platform, while
the DS6000 is competitive with EMC's Clariion products.
IBM is not the only company to recently release some new
high-end storage products. Hitachi last month announced its new
TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, which will be resold by Sun
Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.
According to IDC, IBM had 21.7% market share in the high-end
storage market in 2003. EMC had the largest market share with
34.9%.
Tom Sullivan and Bob Franciswrite for
Infoworld