Not resting on its laurels, Big Blue is serious about wresting the technology lead away from its competitors. By Prashant L Rao
Not content with leading the Indian External Storage market last year, IBM has announced a slew of storage products and technologies that add real time compression of active data and scale out to the Storwize platform as well as RTC and Enhanced Flash Copy features to its DS3500 box.
Compressing active data in real-time
“Most companies compress infrequently used data. We are compressing actively used data and offering up to 80% space savings, all in real time,” commented Subroto Das, Vice President – Storage, Systems & Technology Group, IBM India/ South Asia.
IBM had acquired Storwize back in late 2010 and the v7000 product has proved to be a hit for it. With its latest announcement, the vendor is adding RTC and four-way clustering to this product. These features are embedded in boxes shipping from now on but customers who already own Storwize can buy the IBM Real Time Compression Appliance to take advantage of the same functionality. Storwize is IBM’s play in the Unified Storage portion of the market that’s mostly used by SMBs but also employed by large enterprises for apps that aren’t mission-critical.
The company’s venerable SAN Volume Controller (SVC) will also support RTC going forward. When asked how the vendor had managed to avoid a performance penalty on account of compression, Das indicated that the algorithm used by it was highly efficient.
Also announced were the availability of Enhanced Flash Copy on the DS3500 which means that users can take 50% more snapshots and expedite backups and thin provisioning. Unused pools of storage can be provisioned as needed.
Prognosis for tape
IBM believes in tape. Das argued that the choice of backup medium depended wholly on where a customer’s needs fell on the RPO/RTO matrix. Choices could vary from tape to D2D2T to replication and clustering depending on the criticality. Having said that, he felt that, “Large amounts of data will always be stored on tape.”
On the tape storage front, IBM has the Tape System Library Manager (TSLM) that helps customers that own multiple tape libraries gain a single consolidated view of their tape set-up. The software supports multiple generations of tape libraries and LTO drives etc. It’s offered through Tivoli Storage Manager.
Then there’s the solution for lifecycle management of multimedia files called LTSS that purportedly brings down the cost of tape backup. There’s a new Web-based interface to Tivoli Storage Product Center. Last but not least, like its competitors, IBM has thrown its hat into the auto-tiering storage on the server ring. The company will support SSDs on servers alongside external storage in the future.
Being the dominant player in the Indian external storage market ($255 mn in 2011) with a 28.3% market share, the vendor’s biggest share gain came from the mid-range disk storage segment, which explains the focus on enhancing Storwize.
IBM is counting on these announcements to keep its winning streak going. Some of these features are unprecedented, RTC in particular. However, in the case of bringing server storage into auto-tiering, there have been prior announcements from other players in this area.
In terms of the market, Das saw surveillance, health industry applications and media & entertainment driving the storage market as government spending has slowed down over the last nine months.
