IBM's Array of Storage Announcements

IBM Corp. rolled out almost 40 new storage product and services offerings that the company said took an investment of $2 billion, 2,500 engineers, and three years to complete. The information infrastructure launch is part of IBM's New Enterprise Data Center strategy.

Focal Points:

• Last Monday in conferences in France, New York, and Japan, IBM unveiled its most expansive information infrastructure launch ever. It included intellectual property and products from companies it acquired such as Arsenal (online backup), Cognos (business intelligence), Diligent Technologies (deduplication), Novus (services), and XIV (storage grid infrastructure). The announcements offered solutions that addressed a variety of availability, compliance, energy efficiency, information management, performance, retention, scalability, and security requirements. To help finance all the new solutions IBM Global Financing is offering rates as low as 4.6 percent for hardware purchases, 4.8 percent for software; and 6.3 percent for services as well as environmentally safe storage asset disposal solutions.
• Key new products introduced include highly scalable disk storage systems developed from the XIV acquisition. The system has a unique grid architecture that provides simplified management, greater performance scalability, self-tuning/healing and thin provisioning to help reduce the cost and complexity of information storage while enabling consistently quick access to data. To support storage optimization, IBM's new scale out file services (SoFS) offers flexible storage virtualization with highly scalable clustered network attached storage systems that handle up to 512 billion files. IBM's high capacity TS7650G ProtecTier offering provide new data deduplication hardware and software that can reduce data storage requirements by a factor of up to 25:1. The DS5000, designed for mid-range data center requirements, offers capacity and performance to meet Internet scale demands and can be reconfigured on-the-fly.
• The upgraded DS8000 provides 50 percent more storage capacity and supports RAID 6 protection. The enhanced DR550 compliance disk storage offering supports partitioning, leverages disk and tape, and reduces power consumption by up to 50 percent. On the tape storage front, the TS1130 is a 1 TB per cartridge storage tape drive that is less expensive to use and completes backups up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation and the TS3500 is a high density tape storage library frame. Tivoli's new Key Lifecycle Management software helps automate the management of keys for disk and tape storage devices. On the services front, IBM's Remote Managed Infrastructure Services (RMIS) helps clients cost-effectively monitor, secure and manage their IT infrastructures while addressing increasing workloads. IBM also introduced Onsite and Remote Data Protection offerings to ensure the continuous availability of e-mail and mission-critical applications and data on site in the event of a disaster. IBM's Novus services solutions assist in the leveraging and planning of storage infrastructure by reducing complexity, implementing process standardization, and reallocating underutilized and orphaned assets.

Experton Group believes enterprises will experience unrelenting 50 percent or more physical storage growth over each of the next few years that will exacerbate their current storage pain points and potentially hinder IT's ability to satisfy business requirements. Experton Group predicts enterprises will struggle with the velocity of change such that it will impair their ability to effectively address information infrastructure management, performance, scalability and security demands.  The changes will occur on all fronts – in business requirements, operational objectives, workload demands, and technical innovation. IT executives need to understand the changes that will be occurring over the next two to three years and develop strategies and plans now to address them such that they can meet future demands while still satisfying current operational needs. The critical challenge for IT executives will be the ability to "change the tires on the car while driving at 120 miles per hour."