New Storage Gear Cements IBM’s ILM Plan

IBM is prepping new disk, tape and storage software technologies to help small and medium-sized business customers better manage information on a storage network.

Under the information lifecycle management (ILM) banner for managing data from its creation until its disposal, Big Blue is making the Linear Tape Open (LTO) Generation 3 format ubiquitous across its tape storage drives, tape libraries and autoloaders.

LTO is an open-format tape technology created by IBM, HP and Certance. Generation 3 became available in late 2004 and provides storage capacity of up to 800 gigabytes (GB) and a transfer rate of 80 to 160 megabytes per second (MB/s). TotalStorage tape drives, libraries, and autoloaders with LTO 3 will be available on March 4 starting at $5,999.

This isn’t the first time IBM is offering LTO 3 support. The company last November issued its 3580 iSCSI tape drive with support for LTO 3.

IBM also unveiled performance and capacity enhancements for the TotalStorage DS4000 disk storage systems, adding new 146GB and 300GB Fibre Channel drives to allow for increases in storage capacity. With the improvements, users can expand the DS4000 to a physical capacity of more than 67 terabytes.

The refreshed IBM TotalStorage DS4000 Series will be available April 15.

Many vendors and customers once treated tape and disk storage approaches as either/or propositions. But that is swiftly changing due to the proliferation of compliance rules that require data to be backed up or archived, said Charlie Andrews, director of TotalStorage Solutions at IBM.

Regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II put greater demands on enterprises to recall information quickly. Accordingly, businesses have been using a combination of tape and disk environments to put some data on lower-costing tape storage and other data on more expensive, more reliable and accessible disk systems.

Competitors like IBM, EMC, HP and StorageTek have recognized this and are trying to blend both to meet customer needs.

Andrews said IBM has also bolstered its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), adding support for Sun Microsystems’ StorEdge array models 9910, 9960, 9970, 9980. SVC 2.1.1, which will be available in early March for $47,000, also includes SAN Volume Controller Migration, which helps simplify data migrations between disparate disk arrays.

IBM also released version 2.2.1 of its TotalStorage SAN File System, which helps customers shuttle files such as e-mail around a network. The software now supports Microsoft Clustering for Windows clients.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com