New Storage Gear Cements IBM’s ILM Plan

IBM is prepping new disk, tape and storage software
technologies to help small and medium business customers better manage
information on a storage network.


Under the information lifecycle management (ILM) banner for managing data
from its creation until its disposal, Big Blue is making the Linear Tape
Open (LTO) Generation 3 format ubiquitous across its tape storage drives,
tape libraries and autoloaders.


LTO is an open-format tape technology created by IBM, HP
and Certance. Generation 3 became available in late 2004 and provides
storage capacity of up to 800 gigabytes (GB) and a transfer rate of 80 to
160 megabytes per second (MB/s).
TotalStorage tape drives, libraries, and autoloaders with LTO 3 will be
available on March 4, starting at $5,999.


This isn’t the first time IBM is offering LTO 3 support. The company last
November issued
its 3580 iSCI tape drive with support for LTO 3.


IBM also unveiled performance and capacity enhancements for the TotalStorage
DS4000 disk storage systems, adding a new 146GB, Fibre Channel
drive and a 300GB Fibre Channel drive to allow for
increases in storage capacity. With the improvements, users can expand the
DS4000 to a physical capacity of more than 67 terabytes .


The refreshed IBM TotalStorage DS4000 Series will be available April 15.


Many vendors and customers once treated tape and disk storage approaches as
either/or propositions. But that is swiftly changing due to the
proliferation of compliance rules that require data to be backed up or
archived, said Charlie Andrews, director of TotalStorage Solutions at IBM.


Regulations like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II put greater demands on
enterprises to recall information quickly. Accordingly, businesses have been
using a combination of tape and disk environments to put some data on
lower-costing tape storage and other data on more expensive, more reliable
disk systems.


Competitors like IBM, EMC , HP and StorageTek have recognized this and are trying to blend both to meet customer
needs.


Andrews said IBM has also bolstered its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller
(SVC), adding support for Sun Microsystems’ StorEdge array models 9910, 9960,
9970, 9980. SVC 2.1.1, which will be available in early March for $47,000,
also includes SAN Volume Controller Migration, which helps simplify data
migrations between disparate disk arrays.


IBM also released version 2.2.1 of its TotalStorage SAN File System, which
helps customers shuttle files such as e-mail around a network. The software
now supports Microsoft Clustering for Windows clients.

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