BUSINESS
Big Blue launches little storage box
15-10-2004
by
IBM has said it aims to displace EMC as the storage hardware provider of choice in the Irish market.
The comments, from IBM Ireland pSeries & Storage products manager Michael Coyle, came after the global launch of the firm's new TotalStorage DS6000 and DS8000 series this week. "We will be going aggressively after market share," Coyle said, noting that EMC and to a lesser extent Hewlett-Packard are in the company's crosshairs.
IBM is a long-time player in the data storage business, and research firm IDC puts Big Blue's market share at about 20 percent, compared with 23 percent for HP and just 14 percent for EMC. But in the market for high-end systems -- the types of devices installed on large corporate networks -- IBM trails its two rivals by a wide margin.
The company sought to make several important points about the two new machines, including the fact that the two devices use the same software, tools and interfaces as one another and as the firm's older products. That means that buyers of the new TotalStorage machines should be able to move data between the DS6000 and DS8000 and the older ESS 750s and 800s (members of "Shark" family), a feature that also simplifies device management.
Another much-hyped feature is size, particularly with regard to the DS6000, which Coyle says is more relevant to the Irish market. The device is roughly the size of a VCR, allowing it to fit into a server rack, compared to EMC's comparable unit, the DMX800, a standalone machine which is about the size of a refrigerator.
Coyle said that in companies where floor space is a factor, the DS6000 should prove popular. He also claimed that the machine was ideal for the Irish market, which has very few companies that will require the enormous capabilities of the DS8000.
IBM's DS6000 starts at 550GB (gigabytes) and scales up to 67TB (terabytes) and 224 drives in a single rack. It connects to zSeries, iSeries, Unix, Linux and Intel servers and shares most of the storage-related functional code that comes in the more expensive DS8000 series. The scalability of the box should help it to appeal to a wider range of firms, including firms considered medium-sized, all the way up to large enterprises.
The DS8000, meanwhile, a large refrigerator-sized array, scales up to 640 drives with a maximum capacity of 192TB, IBM said. The firm also noted that it is the first storage system to use the Power 5 processor, which means it is able to support up to 96 petabytes (PB) of internal and external data. The P5 architecture includes a "virtual storage system" feature, which is a partitioning function that lets users divide processor resources in the system for different jobs.
Coyle declined to reveal pricing for the Irish market, but the devices are set to sell for between about USD97,000 and USD4 million in the US. Both the DS6000 and DS8000 should become available in early December.
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