IBM has been playing catch up in the high end of the storage marketplace. IBM's October 2007 DS8000 Turbo Series announcement is an attempt to shore up its position in this space and support competing more broadly in the storage market with products like the SAN Volume Controller (SVC). While SVC is a category leader, the DS8000 has been lagging, a fact which threatens IBM's goal of regaining storage leadership for the simple reason that if IBM can't compete for the world's most demanding applications (from a response-time perspective) it won't be taken seriously as a storage leader in the data center.
Does the DS8000 accomplish the objective of keeping IBM competitive at the high end? Yes, but there's more work to be done, and customers should continue to observe IBM's actions and investments in this area closely. Specifically, with Dynamic Volume Expansion and FlashCopy SE, IBM has addressed some major holes that have kept it out of competitive bids. However, IBM needs to be more than column fodder for EMC-wired deals, and customers should expect/demand continued progress in the form of hardware improvements, higher capacity devices, thin provisioning functionality and further investments to keep pace with EMC and Hitachi.
Storage virtualization with SVC is a different story. IBM is executing brilliantly on its strategy to virtualize heterogeneous data center assets while EMC continues to make excuses for Invista and Hitachi struggles to position the diskless USP VM, leaving the door wide open for IBM.
Action Item: The combination of a broad storage portfolio, excellent services capabilities, SVC leadership and adequate progress at the high end make it hard for customers to exclude IBM from the short list of storage suppliers. While users should continue to push IBM to accelerate the pace of product functionality they should consider IBM in earnest as a serious storage player on critical RFP's.
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