IBM Boosts BladeCenter Storage

ARMONK, N.Y. -- IBM announced today a storage breakthrough in blade computing that will allow small and medium-sized customers and branch offices to consolidate multiple storage devices onto a single blade computing system. Customers can now seamlessly share information across all blade servers in a single system for improved utilization, reliability and reduced costs.

By providing industry-first shared storage” on its newest BladeCenter S system, IBM is bringing enterprise-class storage capabilities to smaller firms and branch offices that lack the IT staff and budgets to manage expanding volumes of business information. With this innovative new approach, IBM is cutting the cost of shared storage technology by 30-40 percent and dramatically reducing the complexity of setting up and managing it

In addition to delivering breakthrough shared storage, IBM is also the only blade server vendor in the industry to offer rapidly growing businesses access to up 12 terabytes of total storage, well over that needed to store the print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress and 12 times the storage capacity of competitive blade offerings for small and medium-sized customers and branch offices.

First launched in 2007, BladeCenter S is specially designed to address these requirements by simplifying the management of technology needed to run a business -- from servers, to phone systems and business applications -- in a single system. BladeCenter S can help reduce the 25 to 45 servers used by an average mid-size company by up to 80 percent. With the addition of shared storage, a requirement for many business applications including IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft Clustering Services, Oracle, SAP and VMWare VMotion, BladeCenter S can now support nearly any business requirement.

IBM Corp.