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IBM Announces New, Upgraded Data Storage Products

Posted on: Monday, 8 September 2008, 16:50 CDT

IBM is announcing a major initiative on Monday to upgrade its computer storage products to include more then 30 new or upgraded products and services.  The move culminates a three-year, $2 billion investment that involved thousands of researchers and the acquisition of eight data storage start-up companies.

Despite slowing economy and continued cost-cutting efforts by many corporate clients, analysts expect sales of storage gear to continue growing as long as businesses keep collecting so much information.

These businesses are being forced to retool their corporate data centers by proliferating data storage requirements driven by customer demands for instant availability of information, and by often draconian record-keeping practices mandated by regulators.

IBM’s new portfolio of storage products and services are designed to help clients manage the transition from static data archives to dynamic storehouses capable of handling two-way data flows via the Internet, IBM said.

"IBM is trying to illustrate how many facets of their storage offerings can be viewed as something strategic and cohesive as opposed to just another series of 'cool products,'" analyst Clay Ryder, the president of Sageza Group, told Reuters.

IBM said its goal is to help customers such as retailers, banks, government agencies and other organizations manage the increasing digitization of entertainment, health care, security and retail information.

The company expects the average person’s "information footprint", the amount of data connected to them, to increase from one terabyte today to more than 16 terabytes by 2020.

"IBM is saying let's talk about general business requirements first, then will go the technology bag of tricks and figure out what the customers need," Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mary Turner told Reuters.

"This is a cross business-unit effort."

The company is highlighting how its wide range of storage products, which include hardware, software and services, position it as the supplier most able to address the storage requirements for customers large and small.

Indeed, only EMC Corp has put forth a similarly strategy for managing all parts of a client’s "information infrastructure”, said analysts.  Both Dell and Hewlett-Packard still sell storage primarily linked to their server products, and although Sun Microsystems is active in the tape market, its products nowhere close as comprehensive as IBM or EMC, the leading independent storage maker.

"At some level IBM is announcing the latest, greatest versions of products that have been around quite a while," Pund-IT Research analyst Charles King told Reuters.

“It is also showing off really interesting next-generation capabilities."

IBM seeks to demonstrate it can reduce the costs of storing vast amounts of information, and is showcasing new technology it acquired in January from XIV, which uses solid-state memory, with no moving parts, instead of magnetic tape or disk-drives to store data.

Although the transition from disk drives to flash-memory has begun in the area of consumer electronics, IBM's announcement suggests that solid-state storage is also now becoming cost effective for large business storage as well.

"This is the industry's first stab at big solid state storage," said Ryder.

"If you don't have spindles and disks, you have no parts to fail and you can use less power."

The new products incorporate the latest data "deduplication" technology, which eliminates the need to retain many copies of the same information, something intended to help clients store much more information within the same amount of physical space. 

Harnessing software and hardware it gained through its April acquisition of Diligent Technologies, IBM said its deduplication technology can reduce redundant data by as much as 25 to 1.  Deduplication joins storage virtualization, another method the company and it competitors are pitching to increase the usage of existing storage equipment while simplifying management and reducing energy use.   It’s something many customers may find compelling as they run out of room in existing data centers to store vast amounts of data.

IBM is also offering a high-density tape storage library system that uses robotic arms to find and read archival data tapes that holds three times as many cartridges within the same floor space.   The company said this would allow corporate clients to store up to three petabytes, or quadrillion bits, of data within 10 square feet of floor space. To secure the data, the company also offers systems with automatic data encryption that utilizes disk supplier Seagate Technology's encrypted hard drives.

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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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