STORAGE

PALM DESERT, CA -- IBM Storage Systems Group senior vice president & group executive, Linda Sanford, in a keynote address yesterday, challenged the industry to reduce the complexity of storage for customers. "Customers are consumed with managing storage costs and data availability due to the complexity of their heterogeneous networked storage environments," said Ms. Sanford. "As an industry, we must do more than provide simple interoperability. We must develop technologies that work together and make storage more manageable so that our customers can realize the full benefits of networked storage." Ms. Sanford then enumerated the pivotal technologies and industry initiatives required to help customers reduce this complexity. Ultimately, these technologies are necessary to the operation of utility-like global storage networks. Ms. Sanford identified four breakthrough advances in storage networking required to help customers enter the next phase of e-business: - Standard application programming interfaces, or APIs, developed by the industry and introduced through an impartial organization, such as Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). - Virtualization technology that presents a common image of all storage space to the servers that can be managed at a single point. - Software that consolidates storage into a single file system, enabling customers to access and manage information from anywhere and any system in their heterogeneous computing environments. - Storage software that can implement business policies that can be managed from a single console and automate user access and configuration. Ms. Sanford indicated that the above technologies will be addressed by IBM under the company's Project eLiza, an initiative to develop technologies that will allow the IT infrastructure to manage itself. These technologies will be crucial to enabling a grid computing infrastructure, which will ultimately turn the Internet into a gigantic virtual computer and make computing power available like electricity through a utility. IDC estimates that one-third of disk storage in 2001 was deployed in a networked environment and projects that two-thirds of data will be networked by 2005. According to Ms. Sanford, one way that the industry will make progress toward achieving these goals in the near future is through the continued evolution of IP-based storage technologies. This is an area where IBM is leading the storage industry through the development and maturation of iSCSI, an emerging standard for using SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) to run data over TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) networks. iSCSI is being widely demonstrated at SNW. IBM and Cisco, the original creators of the emerging iSCSI protocol, announced yesterday that IBM's TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (code named "Shark") became the first enterprise class storage system to complete interoperability testing with the Cisco SN 5420. IBM and Cisco have also entered into a cooperative support agreement covering various Cisco and IBM products -- including the Cisco SN 5420 and the Enterprise Storage Server. In addition, IBM is achieving rapid acceptance of its TotalStorage IP Storage 200i--introduced last year as the industry's first iSCSI storage appliance--in many new and emerging applications. "One of the advantages IBM enjoys, given our leadership in iSCSI solutions, is that we've been working directly with customers for the past year. Hence we have a wealth of experience in delivering high value solutions with iSCSI technology," stated Ms. Sanford. "At past SNWs, you've seen exciting technology or interoperability demonstrations, now you're seeing examples of real, deployable solutions." For more information visit www.ibm.com/totalstorage.