IBM steals business from under EMC's nose
IBM steals business from under EMC's nose
Mar 31, 2005: IBM has signed up a deal with Cisco to provide virtualisation software that will manage Cisco's storage, which happens to be stored EMC's arrays, such as Symmetric and Clariion.
IBM's SAN Volume Controllers will be run with Cisco's MDS 9500 series of multiplayer directors to help it manage information stored on EMC systems.
This acquisition will make Cisco become IBM's 1000th customer of its virtualisation software, and sends a message to EMC and Veritas that it is making a charge at their strong position in the storage market.
It might cause ripples at EMC, because customers currently have to look elsewhere for virtualisation software to manage their storage arrays through one unit.
Andy Monshaw, the general manager of IBM storage systems, said: "IBM is delivering virtualisation at every level of the system -- providing a holistic, end-to-end approach. IBM offers the industry's broadest range of storage virtualisation capabilities from software to disk to tape solutions.
"No other vendor can match IBM's heritage in virtualisation or unique approaches to simplifying our clients' infrastructures. Building on our broad set of virtualisation engine technologies for servers, today's announcement marks a milestone in delivering innovation that matters for our clients and the industry."
In addition, IBM claims that its storage virtualisation software has recently achieved breakthrough performance results in an internal data challenge.
The largest scientific computing grid in the world, Large Hadron Collider, is expected to produce 15 million gigabytes per year when it is up on running in 2007, in a test organised by Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
Using IBM TotalStorage SAN File System storage virtualisation software, the internal tests shattered performance records during a data challenge test by CERN by reading and writing data to disk at rates in excess of 1GB/second for a total I/O of over 1 petabyte (1 million gigabytes) in a 13-day period.
According to IBM, this result shows that IBM's pioneering virtualisation solution has the ability to manage the anticipated needs of what will be the most data-intensive experiment in the world.
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