IBM Unveils New Sleek, Midrange Storage

Looking to grab some momentum and market share from rivals EMC and Hewlett-Packard, IBM took the wraps off a new, midrange storage offering that--in a 3U form factor--could scale up to 67 terabytes.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant said the new device, the DS6000, would weigh in at about $100,000 for an entry-level offering but take only one-twentieth of the space of competing storage products from EMC.

"It takes up 4 percent of the space, and it weighs about one-tenth of [what] the box it is going to replace weighs," said Dan Colby, general manager of storage systems for IBM's Systems and Technology group.

"What's important to customers here is it's [got] a common management system regardless of what type storage you have," Colby said. The server, and a larger, higher-end DS8000 storage system that is capable of scaling to 96 petabytes, would target customers needs in the areas of infrastructure simplification, business continuity or information lifecycle management, he said.

The DS6000 and DS8000 storage offerings is expected to be available on Dec. 3 and ramp up to full volumes by early 2005, IBM executives said.IBM made its announcement during a Tuesday morning conference at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, before several hundred customers, partners, reporters and analysts.

Bill Zeitler, IBM's senior vice president and group executive of the Systems and Technology Group, said that IBM currently maintains about 21 percent market share of the total storage market and about 14 percent of the external storage market.

"Our goal is to double it again in the next four or five years," Zeitler said. "I believe this is possible. We gained 10 points of market share in the last three years in servers."

IBM, HP, EMC and Hitachi have been duking it out on performance benchmarks and market share in the high-end storage space, with EMC the other primary market-share gainer over the past year. With its new products, IBM is moving to bring a series of technologies from other areas of its Systems and Technology Group--including portioning, virtualization, on-demand computing and functions from its blade server offerings--in its effort to outflank those rivals.

With the DS6000, IBM is clearly trying to turn the most heads. The device resembles a typical, rack-mountable server and is based on a PowerPC processor. It runs on Linux and features a configuration wizard, IBM's Light path diagnostics, Calibrated Vectored Cooling developed initially for IBM blade servers, and predictive failure analysis functionality. The systems also will be interoperable with the larger, higher-scaling DS8000 and other IBM storage devices.0