IBM Corp’s announcement of the Seascape storage architecture two years after it was first mooted (CI No 3,183) could yet have a profound effect on enterprise storage market leader EMC Corp, according to industry analysts the Gartner Group. Paul Wolfstaetter, Gartner’s vice president of platform and operating system technology, told ComputerWire that EMC should be concerned because even though IBM has yet to deliver many of the Seascape products, EMC’s Symmetrix product strategy is at odds with the industry trend towards front-end management of multiple storage media or ‘intelligent server’. IBM’s Common Parts Storage Subsystem (CPSS), which is key to the Seascape architecture and due to be announced later this year, combines an RS/6000 server running the AIX operating system with standard adapters and SSA (serial storage architecture) disk, tape or optical drives into a storage computer that can be attached to mainframe and Unix hosts. IBM claims that CPSS will be easier to expand and more flexible than current storage devices and says it will be possible to plug non-IBM components, such as disk or tape drives, into the subsystem. The RS/6000 at the heart of CPSS will also be able to host storage software such as hierarchical storage management, security or even databases, thereby moving workload off the application server and network. The vision is strong, said Wolfstaetter. For the first time IBM Storage Division is using the whole of IBM Corp. There is none of the ‘not-invented- here’ mentality. There is involvement from IBM Poughkeepsie, IBM Texas and IBM San Jose. All of a sudden, IBM is drawing on all its internal strengths. This is an interesting strategy, the question is whether IBM can deliver on the strategy. EMC is, by contrast, sticking with its proprietary microcode and processor model and leaving many of the storage management duties to the application server, says Wolfstaetter, who dubs this the ‘intelligent controller’ model. The intelligent controller passes the responsibility for the creation and management of data on the subsystem to players in the Unix market. The intelligent server enables storage management, convergence and translation of data on the subsystem, he said. Struggling Encore Computer Corp has already delivered on the storage computer model. According to Steve May, MVS national specialist at Cap Gemini Sogeti SA, which uses both Encore’s and EMC’s storage subsystems, the ability to store all the data from multiple platforms into a single storage computer and then access it from multiple platforms was what attracted him to Encore. He adds, however, that for most applications data sharing will not be appropriate.
