IBM's Launches New Storage Infrastructure Initiatives

IBM is focusing this year on few, but broader announcements under the basic theme of its Smarter Planet Initiative. To help customers achieve the goal of deploying dynamic IT infrastructures, the company is delivering a range of products, including foundational Information Infrastructure (i.e. storage) solutions. The first wave of IBM's Information Infrastructure offerings was launched in September 2008, with wave 2 in February 2009, and wave 3 at a recent event in San Diego, Calif.

The new IBM Information Infrastructure offerings encompass a wide range of storage and business processes. They include:

Storage Networking -- IBM views responsive, secure and adaptable data center networking as essential to dynamic infrastructures. From a data center networking perspective, IBM plans support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapters and switches. The goal is to support convergence of both Ethernet and Fibre Channel networks and help customers obtain the benefits that should accrue from such convergence. Specific server adapter and network switch elements are planned for introduction in late 2Q and early 3Q through partnerships with Brocade, Cisco and QLogic.

Midrange Storage -- IBM announced some enhancements for its DS5000 family of midrange storage systems. The DS5300 will now support (as of June 5) up to 448 disk drives, which is a 75% increase in capacity. Actual capacity in TBs will depend upon the size of the drive used. Both the DS5100 and the DS5300 can now use 8-Gbps host interface cards, which IBM claims can lower costs by up to 45% over equivalent 4-Gbps solutions since clients can accomplish the same work with only half as many adapters.

Storage encryption -- Full-disk encryption (FDE) will be offered as of August 21 on DS5000 family arrays. This protects exposing sensitive data on drives that are returned for repair, retired, or repurposed. For this purpose, IBM uses drives that follow the guidelines of the Trusted Computing Group using a drive-based encryption engine that does not impact performance. IBM states that encryption key management is transparent to day-to-day storage administration, which would make FDE drives as easy to manage as unencrypted drives.

Management of Storage -- A new version of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center delivers advanced performance analytics technology and customization features that enable increased overall system performance, reduced management complexities, and improved system availability. The new analytics technology from IBM Research identifies hot spots for problem determination and quick tuning to improve performance and storage utilization by up to 90%. In addition, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, v4.1 takes advantage of the company's NovusCG acquisition to greatly expand storage management reporting capabilities to multiple heterogeneous storage solutions, such as from EMC, Hitachi, HP and NetApp.

Remote data protection -- IBM's continuous data protection capability, which, with its ability to restore data to any point-in time, delivers zero data loss, is now available on a remote basis through Global Technology Services on an IBM hosted data center.

Solid state storage -- Last year IBM showed off a new SSD architecture in an impressive demonstration called Quicksilver. IBM continues its strong focus on solid-state storage, notably flash-based sold state drives (SSDs). The company announced SSD options for Power servers and its enterprise-class DS8000 storage systems. Still, IBM views this as only the beginning as further work still needs to be done on workload monitoring, smart data placement through automation, and advanced server and storage system architectures to further exploit faster devices.

IBM Global Financing -- In these tough economic times, funding and even access to credit is difficult. IBM is facilitating the sale of its storage products and services using its financial muscle in a creative and interesting way. IBM recognizes that in tight financial times customers may not have the budgetary dollars to invest in new IT initiatives even though those initiatives can show what would normally be an acceptable ROI. Typically, the initial cost outlay for projects initially exceeds their financial benefits. To help cash-strapped customers deal with this issue, IBM Global Financing is allowing customers to make minimal payments during the early stages of a project, then more during the later stages when the benefits have started to kick in. This should help make some borderline projects economically feasible, which benefits both customers and IBM.

Not all announcements need to be blockbusters to be effective. IBM is attacking along a number of fronts in its storage-related announcements so attention is not focused on just one product. However, each particular product announcement is useful to a particular customer segment, which can benefit from the new or enhanced capabilities. And that is what IBM hopes to achieve from this set of announcements.

Note that with these announcements IBM is staying abreast of some of the most important trends in the industry. While iSCSI is useful as a storage protocol either as a complement to FC SANs or where there have been no FC SANS, FCoE enables those organizations that already have an investment in FC SANs to be able to incorporate standard Ethernet networks into their storage networking planning. FDE plays to the increased need to preserve the confidentiality of data especially against data breaches that might compromise the privacy of personal individual information. SSDs are going to play a bigger role in storage, but understanding how they can best be used and integrating them properly into existing storage environments has to be carefully thought through in order to be able to justify SSDs economically. So IBM is doing its part in continuing a leadership role in these storage times.

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