IBM Shakes Up Storage Lineup With New Sharks

"I think this is the most important storage announcement they've made in a very long time, even beyond the release of Shark," says Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "What's compelling about this is it's more than a technology refresh. It's really a new architecture. It's a new implementation on the midrange side and the high-end side."

That assessment was shared by one of IBM's largest dedicated systems partners, Mainline Information Systems. "Shark was big but this is just as big," says senior vice president Jimmy Fordham.

IBM unveiled the DS6000 and the ultra-high-end DS8000 at a press briefing in New York. In addition to boasting a new 4-year warranty (double that of prior terms) for both hardware and software, IBM officials said both new products aim to reach new price-performance levels "We believe this market is at a point of discontinuity, and our strategy is around helping customers through this discontinuity," says Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive of IBM's Systems and Technology Group.

Zeitler said its new storage architecture is positioned to help IBM double its share of the storage market over the next five years.

The long-anticipated successor to IBM's ESS 800, the new DS8000 boasts a six-fold performance boost over its predecessor. Based on IBM's Power5 microprocessors and IBM's Virtualization, the new DS8000 supports raw capacity of 192 TB and supports up to 96 PB of external storage.

The new P5-based storage system was released just one quarter after IBM rolled out servers based on the new microprocessor platform, a remarkable milestone, company officials said.

"When we talk about Power5 and the significance of that, we can talk to them about storage and know it has the same building blocks," said Daniel Bongiovanni, a storage specialist for Micro Strategies Inc., a Denville, N.J.-based IBM Business Partner.

Available in two- and four-way configurations, the new DS8000 is IBM's first enterprise storage system to support logical partitioning (LPARs) using IBM's Virtualization Engine. IBM plans to release an eight-way version with 512 GB of cache next year, and potentially higher capacity versions in the future. IBM is requiring channel partners to become certified to sell new systems.

The DS6000 series, IBM's new storage platform addressing the high end of the midrange, will be available through broader distribution. The first model from that lineup, the DS6800, weighs just 125 pounds per enclosure, is 19 inches wide and 3u (5 and a quarter-inch form factor). It can hold up to 224 drives or 67.2 TB of raw capacity, has support for advanced copy services and support for mainframe, iSeries and connectivity to open systems' servers. It is interoperable with the new DS8000. Moreover, both systems share 75 percent of the code-base of the older Shark system, which IBM says should reduce the learning curve for partners.

IBM said it is also slashing the costs of its new offerings. The new DS8000 will cost $134,000 for a 5-TB configuration, a 58 percent discount over the ESS800. The DS6000 will cost $97,000 for a half-terabyte of capacity with host and mainframe connectivity. The initial release of the DS6000 will ship with Fiber Channel drives, but IBM is planning to release a version with ATA drives in the first half of next year. The new products will be available in December.