IBM reveales sharks storage systems to Australian market

Sydney 30 Jul 99 IBM unveiled its plans to bite off huge chunks of Australia's high-end computer storagemarket previously ceded to storage specialists outfits such as EMC. The new ESS boxes, part of IBM's "Seascape" family of products, can hold from 420 gigabytes up to 11 terabytes of data, eclipsing EMC's top 9-terabyte systems. They will work with all enterprise computing platforms, including S/390, Unix, NT and AS/400.

The codename for IBM's new Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) technology at the heart of the project is Shark - and the fins were popping up everywhere in Sydney Wednesday. More than 250 corporate customers brandished rubber sharks at an IBM event in Sydney.

A "snap-in" design is said to allow customers to easily add capacity or boost performance as needs grow. IBM's "FlashCopy" fast data duplication services reportedly eliminate the need to stop servers or applications to perform backups and restores.

The technology forms part of IBM's move to a storage area network (SAN) strategy. SANs are described as separate networks of storage devices dedicated to managing and storing data without tying up the computing resources of the server.

For several years IBM has been reselling products from Storage Technology [NYSE:STK] while it geared up the Shark project; this period has seen EMC take 35 percent of the global open systems storage market, with IBM holding about 22 percent.

Now, says Australian enterprise systems manager John Twine, the man-eaters are finally being turned loose. "It's an exciting day for us," said Twine.

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