IBM sets out storage strategy

IBM has announced a major launch of storage products and technology to help customers deal with the huge amounts of data they hold.

The launch is the result of a £1bn investment in research and development.

The company said the announcement would include around 30 new and upgraded products, but an IBM executive admitted that the announcement was "so big" it was difficult to pin down the exact number.

"I think between 15 and 20 of the announcements are genuinely new products and then there are a lot of upgraded and enhanced products," Charlie Andrews, IBM's worldwide director for systems storage products, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet.co.uk.

The announcements include new tape and disk products. While tape may not be fashionable, it has enjoyed a new lease of life as companies have been forced by legal requirements to store data for long periods. IBM's TS3500, announced on Monday, is aimed at that market.

According to IBM, the TS3500 can store up to three petabytes (equal to 3,000 terabytes) in 10 square feet, using what the company called "a completely new design of [tape] library frame". "It offers the greatest density of any storage drive in the world," Andrews said.

Despite the prevalence of storage products in the announcement, Andrews was keen to stress that it was not a storage announcement. "There are a lot of diverse products and initiatives in this announcement," he said. "The key is the way we are tying all these products together. This is a series of things that have been building up over time."

IBM's big enterprise customers are dealing with more data than ever before, and this initiative is designed to help them manage the sheer volume of information more efficiently and cost effectively. In IBM's view, the best way to do this is through storage and allied technology.

"This is about information, the information overload and ways of dealing with that," Andrews said.

Some of IBM's £1bn investment has gone, over time, on buying companies and technologies, as well as on home-grown technology. One such technology, a new enterprise disk called the DS5000, came from the acquisition of XIV. This disk uses a grid-based architecture that, according to IBM, "offers easier management, greater performance scalability, self-tuning/healing and thin provisioning". The DS5000 is designed to scale up as requirements increase and to reconfigure "on the fly", the company said.

Diligent Technologies is another company that IBM purchased, back in April. Diligent's software is designed to help companies reduce information clutter and cut back redundant data by a factor of 25 to one, IBM said.

The software is intended to help move non-critical data offsite. In addition, IBM is now offering onsite and remote data protection through its acquisition of another company, Arsenal.

In a statement, IBM said the acquisitions that made the new push possible also included Cognos, Optim, FilesX, Softek and NovusCG, all of which have been bought in the last 24 months.

"The world is retooling its underlying IT infrastructure in a dramatic shift away from a decades-old client/server model to a radically more efficient internet-style architecture," Andy Monshaw, general manager in IBM System Storage, said in a statement on Monday. "This requires different thinking and new capabilities."

No pricing has yet been announced on any of the products.