IBM Beefs Up Its ILM Offerings

Customers are cementing ILM offerings from IBM deep in their storage environments for use as underpinnings to centrally create, nurture and dispose of growing data volumes.

IBM beefed up its information lifecycle management portfolio of tiered, midrange products last week by unveiling new disk, tape and storage virtualization enhancements, buoyed by the launch of its ROInow tool to help customers evaluate blended, tiered storage and ILM.

Next month, IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., will incorporate LTO (Linear Tape-Open) 3 into its line of LTO-based automated tape-storage systems, thus doubling their capacity. Further, Version 2.1 of TotalStorage SVC (SAN Volume Controller) will be released, providing new Sun Microsystems Inc. support and an SVC Migration feature to simplify disparate disk array migration.

In April IBM will offer 146GB 15K Fibre Channel disk drives and a 300GB 10K Fibre Channel disk drive for its TotalStorage DS4000.

Click here to read about Xiotechs scaled-down version of its Magnitude 3D SAN-based storage subsystem for midtier organizations.

Users said storage virtualization will be a primary driver toward systematic ILM. "Virtualization will enable us to move into the ILM world much more smoothly," said IBM SVC user Ken Westerback, an IT administrator for Toronto-based St. Michaels Hospital.

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