IBM reworks storage strategy to manage data

Eric Auchard

IBM is making a major push to upgrade computer storage products and services
it offers customers struggling to manage mountainous piles of data being created
inside their organizations.

The company is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services
that are the result of a $2 billion investment over the last three years
involving thousands of IBM researchers and eight acquisitions of data storage
start-ups.

Even as the economy slows and businesses move to slash spending on computers
and network gear, sales of storage will continue to spiral-at least until
someone invents a way for companies to stop collecting so much data, analysts
say.

Proliferating data storage requirements brought on both by customer demands
to keep information instantly available and by mounting record-keeping mandated
by regulators are forcing companies to retool their corporate data centers.

IBM said its new line-up of storage products and services are designed to
help customers manage the transition from static data archives to dynamic
storehouses ready to manage two-way data flows over the Internet.

"IBM is trying to illustrate how many facets of their storage offerings can
be viewed as something strategic and cohesive as opposed to just another series
of 'cool products,'" said analyst Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group.

International Business Machines Corp said it aims to help customers-big
banks, retailers, government agencies and other organizations-contend with the
growing digitization of entertainment, health care, security and retail
information.

IBM estimates that the average individual's 'information footprint'-the
amount of data connected to a person-will grow to more than 16 terabytes by 2020
from roughly one terabyte, or trillion bytes, of data currently.

"IBM is saying let's talk about general business requirements first, then
will go the technology bag of tricks and figure out what the customers need,"
said Mary Turner, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

Competitively, IBM is showcasing how the breadth of its storage-related
hardware, software and related services can be made to work together for
customers small and large.

Only EMC Corp, the leading independent storage maker, has articulated a
similarly broad strategy for managing all parts of an organization's
"information infrastructure," analysts said. Hewlett-Packard and Dell still sell
storage largely tied to their server products, while Sun Microsystems is also
active in the tape market, but its offerings are nowhere near as comprehensive
as IBM or EMC.

Squeezing in more data

"At some level IBM is announcing the latest, greatest versions of products
that have been around quite a while," said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT
Research. It is also showing off really interesting next-generation
capabilities.

Source: CIOL