IBM 'Racks Up' Midmarket Storage

According to IBM, the most significant element of Thursday's additions to its storage portfolio is the Storwize V7000, a 2U rack-based disk system with enterprise-class performance packaged for the midmarket. Reportedly, it can reduce storage rack space by up to 67 percent and improve performance by 300 percent with automatic migration to solid state drives (SSD) through the integration of IBM System Storage Easy Tier software. Other features include thin provisioning, dynamic migration for continuous availability of applications while migrating data and FlashCopy for faster and more efficient data copies for online backup, testing or data mining. IBM also announced storage hardware, software and service announcements, including the DS8800 disk system, which offers 40 percent better performance over its predecessor.

For the last quarter (2Q10) IDC (Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker) reported that external disk storage systems factory revenues posted year-over-year growth of 20.4 percent, totaling just over $5 billion, with IBM a distant second at 13.6 percent to EMC at 25.7 percent. For total disk storage factory revenue, IBM came in third with 15.8 percent behind HP with 19.3 percent and EMC's 19 percent.

Based on IDC data, IBM says storage capacity worldwide will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 49.8 percent from 2009-2014. According to the company the problem is that organizations are already struggling with the volume and evolving nature of the data they're already collecting. Its solution is a combination of home-grown storage innovations like the Easy Tier technology together with acquisitions of technologies such as XIV.

Easy Tier can improve performance by up to 200 percent, automatically moving the most active data to faster SSDs and moving secondary data to more cost-effective storage technologies. The XIV high-end disk storage architecture that IBM acquired in 2008 enables it to adapt to changing workloads and deliver consistently high performance.

Howard Marks, founder of Deep Storage.net says "I'm impressed with the V7000.  IBM's midrange storage, like the DS5300, has been pretty generic and OEMed from LSI, and they say they say the V7000 isn't replacing it. The V7000 combines their own Storage Volume Manager software with Intel processors to create a midrange version of HDS's VSP, which is an array and a virtualization platform all in one."Other 'acquired' innovations include IBM ProtecTIER deduplication technology to help eliminate duplicate copies of data and improve storage efficiency, and the IBM Real-time Compression Appliances to help reduce physical storage requirements by up to 80 percent. Another home-grown technology is IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), which supports multiple petabytes of storage in a single file system.

Available in two versions, the Model 951 and the expansion Model 95E, the DS8800 is powered by Power6-based processors and can support a total of 1056 drives in up to 50-percent less floor space than an IBM System Storage DS8700 system. Shipments are scheduled to start by October 22.

David Hill, principal at Mesabi Group LLC, says that while both the DS8800 and V7000 are solid additions to IBM's storage lineup, the Storwize product represents a completely new product, not just an enhancement to the DS5000 series. It is "really strong in its ability to provide functional capabilities that the midrange needs, but typically have been thought of as enterprise-class features only. Overall, the Storwize V7000 is an impressive midrange storage product."

IBM also updated the SAN Volume Controller software that includes Easy Tier--an improved administrator GUI and increased scalability--and the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.2 software, which has been enhanced for midrange systems. The company has also tweaked its Systems Director Storage Control software. The latest version, V4.2.1,  adds a number of features, including storage resource discovery and inventory collection, health status and alerting, capacity status, and device support for the DS8000, V7000, SAN Volume Controller and Brocade Fibre Channel switches.