IBM Readies Storage Tank Rollout

IBM on Monday said that its long-in-the-works “Storage Tank” virtualized storage will ship in mid-November.

Storage Tank, which will be officially dubbed the IBM TotalStorage SAN File System, will be available worldwide on November at prices beginning at $90,000. IBM will also release two versions of its TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller software, one for OEMs including Hitachi Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co., and a second version which will be designed into a Cisco MDS 9000 caching module.

IBM and Cisco last week announced work on a new standard for “self-healing” networks.

The SAN Volume Controller software, its virtualization appliance software, will be available for download from IBMs Web site on Nov. 14, IBM said in a statement. The rollout of the Storage Tank software sill be supported by a new sales force.

IBM has been developing this virtualization and storage management technology since 1999. Storage Tank virtually ties together storage servers in multiple locations over an IP network, and then presents those individual resources as a local file system that any server can access.

In addition, IBM said file system technology will allow customers to designate unused capacity on their servers for use with the Storage Tank software, and lock down files through distributed file locking. To better manage the additional data, IBM updated its Tivoli Storage Resources Manager Software version 1,3 to include support for the TotalStorage SAN File System, and allow it to manage the groups of virtual disks through the Tivoli San Manager 1.3 interface. In addition, Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2.2 has been updated to back up the client platforms supported by the TotalStorage SAN system.

IBMs Tivoli General Manager Robert LeBlanc this summer laid out his vision of where Tivoli management software fits in IBMs strategy.

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