IBM brings solid-state backup to businesses

 

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By Barry Collins and Reuters

Posted on 8 Sep 2008 at 08:28

IBM is launching a raft of new products and services to help businesses manage the growing mountains of corporate data - including the introduction of solid-state storage into big businesses.

The company is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services that are the result of a $2 billion investment over the past three years, involving thousands of IBM researchers and eight acquisitions of data storage start-ups.

Seeking to show it can cut the costs of storing massive amounts of data, IBM is demonstrating new technology from its January acquisition of XIV using solid-state memory instead of the hard disk drives or magnetic tape now used to store data.

The transition from disk drives to flash memory has begun to occur in consumer electronics, but IBM's announcement suggests that solid state storage is becoming cost effective in big business storage.

"This is the industry's first stab at big solid-state storage," claims analyst Clay Ryder, the president of Sageza Group. "If you don't have spindles and disks, you have no parts to fail and you can use less power."

And it is incorporating the latest data deduplication technology, which eliminates the need to keep many copies of the same information, a move that promises to help customers save vastly more information in the same amount of office space.

Making use of software and hardware it acquired by buying Diligent Technologies in April, IBM says the deduplication technology can reduced redundant data by up to 25 to 1.

Deduplication joins storage virtualisation, another technique that IBM and it rivals are promoting to increase the usage of existing storage equipment while making it easier to manage and cutting energy usage.

Companies are running out of room in existing data centers to store these growing piles of information. IBM is offering a high-density tape storage library system that uses robotic arms to locate and read archival data tapes that holds three times more cartridges in the same floor space. Businesses can store up to three petabytes of data in 10 square feet of floor space, it claims.

To secure this data, the company is also offering systems with automatic data encryption that take advantage of disk supplier Seagate's encrypted hard drives.

Healthy storage spending

Even as the economy slows and businesses move to slash spending on computers and network gear, sales of storage will continue to spiral - at least until someone invents a way for companies to stop collecting so much data, analysts say.

Proliferating data storage requirements brought on both by customer demands to keep information instantly available and by mounting record-keeping mandated by regulators are forcing companies to retool their corporate data centres.

IBM said its new line-up of storage products and services are designed to help customers manage the transition from static data archives to dynamic storehouses ready to manage two-way data flows over the internet.

"IBM is trying to illustrate how many facets of its storage offerings can be viewed as something strategic and cohesive as opposed to just another series of 'cool products,'" claims Ryder.

Big Blue says it aims to help customers - big banks, retailers, government agencies and other organisations - contend with the growing digitisation of entertainment, health care, security and retail information.

IBM estimates that the average individual's "information footprint" - the amount of data connected to a person - will grow to more than 16 terabytes by 2020 from roughly one terabyte of data currently.