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IBM Will Help City Enhance Data Storage

Posted on: Thursday, 16 June 2005, 03:00 CDT

International Business Machines Corp. said yesterday that it has joined with Richmond's information-technology department in an effort to pump more productivity out of the city's data-storage networks.

The city's storage systems will be installed with IBM software that will enable the hardware manufactured by IBM and its rival, EMC Corp., to "speak" to one another, said IBM spokesman Charles Zinkowski. The technology is known as storage virtualization.

Before the software installation, the city's storage networks were operating at 40 percent capacity, Zinkowski said.

With the new software, IBM's SAN Volume Controller, the data- storage capacity and utilization on the systems will jump to about 85 percent, Zinkowski said. The software will also cut costs in the IT department.

In the past, if one server was overcommitted, it couldn't get used by anyone else, said Elizabeth Mounts, IT director in Richmond. With the virtualization, the servers will see one, common pool of storage. Such tasks as archiving, backup and recovery will become faster with the IBM technology.

The Richmond IT department can also select different vendors for the hardware, as IBM's software is compatible with various manufacturers.

About 3,500 people in Richmond government jobs access the storage devices daily, city IT officials said. The new technology will give computer users the ability to manage and access information more efficiently.

The general public will see little difference in their Web- surfing experience on the city's online site, www.RichmondGov.com, Mounts said. Storage virtualization is still an emerging market among software companies, and IBM has roughly 1,000 customers.

Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch

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