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IBM Now Bigger and Better

IBM has for some time been seeking a way to strengthen its position in the storage market, and the solution has finally been found. IBM will now be offering to its clients a range of new products covering storage management, tape and disk storage, and storage virtualization, all designed to simplify the expansion of installed storage for both small and large companies, and ease the processes of IT business operations.

IBM is offering an enhanced version of its System Storage DS8000 Turbo Series, specially suited to large enterprises, that features "Flashcopy SE" ? a data `snapshot' capability for critical operations data. Starting at about US$6,500, the product will reduce the storage constraints of data back up images by including only snapshots of the data subsets specified. Another important feature of the DS8000 is the ability add additional disk space with reconfiguring the existing storage volume.

The System Storage Productivity Center (SSPS) will allow businesses to centralize their control of storage devices. The console features a topology viewer, plus reporting and monitoring, and its starting price is US$7,500. Slightly cheaper is IBM`s new virtualized disk and tape storage, which is capable of virtualizing file systems via Linux, Windows, Unix, and more. As such, all storage installed onto this device will be part of a single drive network.

Other products that have been revamped for the better include the Virtualization Engine TS7520 tape solution which will have 750Gb disks, and the System Storage TS2240 Tape Drive Express Model LTO 4 Half-High which boasts 800GB of tape capacity. According to Vice President, Cindy Grossman, "the overarching message here is that we`re looking at providing better solutions for all of our customer base."