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IBM Unveils Ultra-Powerful Suite of Storage Solutions for Cost-Effective Data Management


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New Tape, Disk and Software Offerings Designed to Provide High Scalability and Performance for Information Lifecycle Management Solutions

ARMONK, NY, 02/17/2005, IBM today introduced radically advanced disk, tape and storage software technologies designed to help clients more efficiently manage information through its lifecycle from creation to disposal. Specifically, these products provide businesses with low-cost storage options and greater choice.

“Clients are no longer buying individual storage products, but rather complete packaged offerings that solve business problems. While other competitors may discuss visions of information lifecycle management, no one can deliver complete information lifecycle management solutions like IBM because of our deep and proven expertise in tape and storage virtualization,” said Barry Rudolph, Business Line Executive for Information Lifecycle Management at IBM. “The products we are announcing today demonstrate our continued innovation in providing clients of all sizes innovative technology solutions.”

The new and enhanced offerings include:


-- IBM Midrange Tape -- IBM is incorporating the third-generation Linear Tape Open™ (LTO®) format into its complete line of LTO-based automated tape storage systems. This includes LTO Ultrium™ Generation 3-enabled IBM® TotalStorage® Tape Drives, Tape Libraries, and Tape Autoloaders. LTO 3 has significant performance gains over previous generations of LTO as well as up to double the capacity. Additionally, the company announced the option of a dual robotics feature for the TotalStorage 3584 tape library that more than doubles the tape mount performance rate of the system while helping increase subsystem availability and reliability. With increased mandates for companies to store data either as back-up or as archived, more and more companies are looking at joint tape/disk environments to provide cost-effective, long-term storage solutions to meet data retention and compliance needs, as well as be central to efficiently managing data over its lifecycle. In a recent Data Mobility Group report that looked at both hardware and environmental costs for a sample customer solution, it was estimated that an all disk storage environment could cost clients as much as five times what an all tape environment could cost.

-- IBM Midrange Disk -- IBM is announcing performance and capacity enhancements for the IBM TotalStorage DS4000 Series of disk storage systems. New 146GB 15k Fibre Channel disk drives and a 300GB 10k Fibre Channel Disk Drive allow for scalable, grow-as-you-need storage capacity. With these enhancements, customers can now configure the system with headroom to grow to a physical capacity of more than 67 Terabytes. Today, IBM’s DS4000 systems are the storage systems of choice for clients simplifying their infrastructure using IBM eServer BladeCenter™.

-- IBM Storage Virtualization Software -- IBM is introducing version 2.1 of its premier virtualization offering, the IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), making this the sixth version of its storage virtualization software. This latest version continues to enhance SVC’s ability to manage diverse environments, including operating systems and clustering software. Another new feature being added to the product includes SAN Volume Controller Migration, which helps simplify data migrations between disparate disk arrays.

SVC is now available in a flexible, per-terabyte pricing model, well suited for mid-market customers. Additionally, IBM recently released version 2.2.1 of its TotalStorage SAN File System, which includes Microsoft® Clustering support for Windows® clients and simplified administration and authorization setup to help provide greater flexibility. SAN File System is crucial in helping achieve data lifecycle management efficiencies through policy-driven automation and tiered-storage management.

Polices defined by the users help give the ability to match the cost of a client’s storage resources to the value of their data.

IBM and Independent Software Vendor solutions can help clients efficiently manage electronic data such as email across a tiered storage environment as the data progresses through its lifecycle. A study published in December by leading IT market research and advisory firm IDC states that worldwide revenues for e-mail archiving applications is expected to top $180 million in 2004, up from just $33 million two years ago, and continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 50% through 2008(1).
IBM today also launched a total cost of ownership tool called TCONow™ to help clients better understand the advantages of a tiered storage and ILM implementation. The TCONow tool helps clients analyze the total cost of ownership of a solution as well as competitive solutions to help clients financially model the cost implications of alternative disk, tape, and tiered disk/tape storage deployments.

Pricing and Availability

IBM’s TotalStorage Tape Drives, Tape Libraries, and Tape Autoloaders with LTO 3 will be available on March 4, 2005 starting at a list price of $5,999. The new IBM TotalStorage DS4000 Series performance and capacity enhancements will be available on April 15, 2005. The TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller v. 2.1.1 will be available in early March for a list price of $47,000. The enhanced IBM TotalStorage SAN File System is available immediately.

About IBM

IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.

The following are either trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both: IBM, BladeCenter, the IBM e-business logo and TotalStorage. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Linear Tape Open, LTO and Ultrium are trademarks of Hewlett Packard, IBM and Certance in the United States, other countries or both. All other company, product or service names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of others. Statements concerning IBM’s future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.

(1) Source: IDC, Worldwide Email Archiving Applications 2004-2008 Forecast and 2003 Vendor Shares, IDC #32639, December 2004.



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