Assuming that IBM is talking about weekdays only, that is equivalent to a run-rate of 1,000 to 1,300 new customers per year, in addition to new SVC sales to existing customers. IBM itself said this week it was a little over a year ago that it announced its 1,000th SVC customer.
The SVC began shipping in 2003, and so enjoyed a head-start over other tier-one storage vendors’ virtualization products.
Hitachi Ltd and its OEM customers Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co began shipping the Hitachi TagmaStore disk array late in 2004. The TagmaStore can virtualize Hitachi and third-party arrays attached to it, and last month Hitachi’s subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems said that around 40% to 45% of the TagmaStores it has sold – including the cut-down NSC versions – are being used to virtualize something.
EMC Corp, the third large high-end storage vendor, began selling its Invista virtualization software late last year, and is still not talking about sales numbers.
