IBM brings high-end storage functions to midrange
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IBM on Tuesday announced two new storage products â upper midrange and high-end disk arrays designed for ease of use and lower cost. The DS6000 and DS8000 feature higher physical storage capacities, a modular architecture, and additional visualization technology, all in systems considerably smaller than previous versions.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is unveiling Thursday a new virtual tape drive management system for mainframes that compares to similar technology introduced last spring by rival Sun Microsystems. The IBM System Storage TS7700 Virtualization Engine is the successor to its TotalStorage Virtual Tape Server and offers increased capacity, faster processing speed and improved disaster recovery features. Because copying batches of data onto a tape is a time-consuming practice, tying up server operations, virtual storage systems save the data into a disk cache for transfer onto tape at a later time. The TS 7700 offers 6TB of disk cache storage capacity, a four-fold increase over the 1.5TB of cache in the previous model, said Cindy Grossman, vice president of IBM tape storage systems. An available 3:1 data compression ratio enhances capacity further. Also, because it operates in a grid computing environment, the 7700 can simultaneously copy data to two different tape storage sites for improved disaster recovery, said Grossman. Data can be "mirrored" to multiple sites and the system will know where to find it. IBM's announcement follows aÂ similar product launch from SunÂ by more than five months. In May that company refreshed its Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager System, a tape drive manager also for mainframe environments, which also stores data in disk cache for later copying onto tapes and offers double the capacity and performance of its previous generation technology. SunÂ acquired StorageTekÂ in 2005. "These products tend to leapfrog over one another," said Mike Kahn an analyst with The Clipper Group, a research firm in Wellesley, Mass. Enterprises are looking for better utilization of their tape storage networks, including improved access to data on them, Kahn said. Storing data to a disk and then later to tape gives enterprises some storage flexibility. If an insurance company receives a claim form, it can save that on disk if it needs to retrieve it quickly while the claim is still active. But if a claim has been completed, that file can be copied onto tape. The virtual tape storage market for mainframe systems is a two-company market, of Sun and IBM, he said. The two companies last week each introduced new tape encryption technology one day apart.
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Solid's embedded database can store and retrieve data from main memory, giving faster performance than traditional disk-based systems.
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Linux Networx has developed a clustered storage appliance which is able to pool capacity from separate storage devices into a single high-capacity resource.
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IBM&#39;s new four-year storage strategy, laid out last week, came with a few surprises. First, the talk was all about gee-whiz hardware and lower costs, not related services.
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Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte level.Systems capable of that scale will be available beginning in the middle of this year, according to the company. The increased performance will be made possible in part through the company&#39;s recently announced Compress Engine, for advanced compression, according to Netezza. The new systems will also support multiterabyte per hour data-loading, the company said.Netezza, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, has regularly announced performance improvements since launching its appliance in 2002. That initial version could handle up to 6TB of data, according to the company. That leapfrogged to 27TB in 2004 and 100TB in 2005, Netezza said.&quot;We have a number of customers who are now at or approaching that upper range,&quot; said Phil Francisco, the company&#39;s director of product marketing.Francisco said the new systems will preserve the company&#39;s existing pricing model. Low-end systems start below $200,000 and scale up from there, with support coming at additional cost, he said.Richard Winter, a consultant with Winter Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts, said the BI market is ripe for more powerful data-crunching products. &quot;Every time you turn around you see another industry that&#39;s facing a tidal wave of data and they need to understand what this data is saying,&quot; he said. &quot;Many of them have data volumes in this range that they haven&#39;t been able to afford to analyze, as much as they&#39;d like to. ... [Netezza] can deliver that analytic capability, and at a very attractive price.&quot;James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research, said Netezza is now aiming for the highest end of the data warehousing market, going after the likes of Teradata.&quot;Being able to scale up to a petabyte in context of an NPS deployment will go a long way toward getting Netezza in that inner circle of vendors,&quot; he said.The company may face certain problems of perception when attempting to poach such vendors&#39; customers, however. &quot;Their chief challenge is the fact that they&#39;re a startup,&quot; Kobielus said. &quot;They&#39;re definitely not as old and mature as the IBMs and Teradatas.&quot;Netezza also may have limited appeal to customers that would prefer a one-stop shopping approach for their BI-data warehousing needs. Instead, Netezza has partnered with BI vendors such as Business Objects.In addition, heightened competition may be around the corner for the firm, according to the analysts.&quot;Over the course of the year you&#39;ll also see some appliance-type offerings from the major players like Teradata and Oracle,&quot; Winter said. &quot;They&#39;ll compete down the road.&quot;Kobielus said he sees Microsoft making a particularly strong push in coming months.&quot;I am confident Microsoft will have some really important announcements this year,&quot; he said. &quot;Definitely look out for those guys.&quot;
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IBM plans to offer solid state drive technology from SanDisk Corp. as a data storage option for its Intel-based high-end blade server.
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Last Month saw IBM launch a range of very high performance, very cost effective Unix servers with the release of its latest pSeries machines.
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While adding a lot of cost to the system, for some mobile users, solid-state storage is a compelling alternative to traditional hard drives.
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New Hitachi drive represents a giant leap forward in  notebook storage.
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HP is the latest to offer a server-storage product targeted to small- to mid-size businesses.
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OCTOBER 11, 2004 (NETWORK WORLD) - IBM this week is expected to debut its highest-capacity storage arrays, although the products&#39; real differentiator is a mix of management technologies designed to help customers get a better handle on where to store
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IBM recently unveiled the TotalStorage DS6000, a roughly VCR-size system aimed at mid-size businesses. The new DS8000 series system features IBM Power5 microprocessors and IBM&#39;s Virtualization
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IBM wants to topple the world&#39;s leader in computer storage technology with a new shoe-box sized disk system developed at IBM Storage Systems Divisions in Tucson.
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When IBM (Quote, Chart) unveiled its new, high-octane storage server at an event in New York Tuesday, it became apparent the company made some headway in taking virtualization features from its mainframe systems and dropping them into its storage line.
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SEPTEMBER 06, 2004  - IBM announced a pair of entry-level workgroup disk arrays last week, including a scaled-down reincarnation of an iSCSI-based device that the company dropped two years ago.
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ALMADEN, CALIFORNIA -- IBM has begun work on new technologies designed to boost the capacity of tape storage devices by 250 times. Using "nanopatterning" techniques derived from the company's microprocessor division, researchers say they expect to one day build cartridges that can store as much as 100TB of data.