If it's storage, it's got to be IBM

Virtualization will be a key driver in industry growth over the next few

years

At least that's what IBM wants its customers to believe. The company took

representatives from some prospective customers and its partner organizations to

the exotic city of Miyazaki in Japan on a two-day visit. (May 22-24, 2005). The

objective was to create awareness about its comprehensive storage offer-ings and

how it was geared to take its customers to the next level of infrastructure

management.

The conference, which was called the 'IBM AP Total-Storage Customer Summit

2005' had over 400 attendees. McData, Brocade and Cisco were the cosponsors

for this event. The presence of all these companies under a single roof was

targeted at bolstering the confidence of the attending members that a concerted

effort to integrate multi-product and multi-vendor storage management solutions

is on.

Sharing the results of certain market research, IBM impressed upon the

audience how it outgrew the external disk market in Q1, 2005. Its APAC disk

business grew 28 percent year-on-year in this period, while market grew at three

percent. IBM attributes part of this success to the launch of the new DS8000,

which comes with a four-year warranty. The company has also started bagging

orders, especially from India, for another new product-the DS4800.

IBM also stressed upon the fact that virtualization will be a key driver in

industry growth over the next few years. It outlined its technology roadmap in

this space, highlighting the business advantages of moving up to storage

virtualization, going beyond SAN/NAS solutions. Steve Legg, Chief Architecture,

IBM Storage said that these integrated solutions will encompass not just IBM's

product suites, but those of its competitors as well. This will give customers

the mobility of managing storage from a single workflow-based admi-nistration

console.

Another initiative that IBM aggressively promoted was its 'On-Demand

Business' strategy.

Andy Monshow, GM, IBM

Vinita Bhatia


Miyazaki/Japan