The deal will see IBM elbow aside disk arrays it had been OEM’ing from Adaptec Corp, replacing them with devices that are OEM’ed from LSI and will ship at the end of this month.
The switch will bolster what had been IBM’s weak position in the competitive and fast growing entry-level disk market, and extend its relationship with LSI.
IBM’s take-up of the devices will also considerably boost the presence of SAS disk drives in the storage market, so increasing the challenge that these devices will make to the incumbent Fibre Channel technology.
With list prices starting at just under $5,000, the new boxes will be a channel play aimed squarely at SMBs, as well as at branch office and departmental use by larger companies.
This is a fast growing sector in which competition has been intensifying. IBM’s new boxes will come against gear such as EMC Corp’s Clariion AX-150, and more recent entrants such as Hewlett-Packard Co’s All-In-One, and Network Appliance Inc’s StoreVault.
Until now IBM has been attempting to hold up its end in this sector with its DS300 and DS400 boxes, which are manufactured by Adaptec. According to long-running rumors these have been less than fully competitive products, which IBM has been hoping to replace.
Presumably the reason why it took so make the replacement is that IBM had committed itself to LSI’s Simplicity arrays, which themselves took longer than expected to come to market. LSI first began describing these devices as AX-150-beaters in 2005, but only got around to shipping them last month.
This week IBM said that its channel partners are not dragging their heels over the cut-over to the new boxes. There’s been extraordinary interest in the new products. Last week we trained 1,392 partners on them, said the company’s director of product marketing Alex Yost.
Although SGI announced also last month announced that it will this quarter begin shipping boxes based on the Simplicity technology, IBM is the first big supplier to be named as an OEM customer by LSI.
The two companies are already well known to each other. Since 2001, IBM has been OEM’ing LSI’s popular mid-range disk arrays, which are also re-badged by SGI, and Sun.
While LSI must be pleased that its largest customer taking on the Simplicity products, the downside is that it will have even more eggs in IBM’s basket than before. Currently just over half of its revenue comes from IBM.
The term OEM is only loosely defined. IBM is not buying entire Simplicity disk arrays from LSI, but is taking the controllers and the software that are the core of such devices. This is about the same level of supply as for the mid-range disk arrays that IBM does not balk at being described as OEM’ed from LSI.
The Simplicity technology is also about to be OEM’ed by EMC’s long-term OEM customer, Dell Corp, according to Computer Business Review’s sources. Yesterday LSI declined to comment on these claims, although it did say that it will be naming more OEM announcements, but not in the short term.
As for the arrays themselves, the devices feature SAS disk drives internally, and depending on the model, SAS front-end ports for direction connections to host servers, or Fibre Channel front-end ports for connection to a SAN switch.
The only other tier-one supplier to be shipping disk arrays powered by SAS drives is HP, which last month launched an option for 2.5in SAS in direct-attach-only extensions to its Proliant servers.
SAS – serial-attached SCSI – is to existing parallel SCSI what SATA was to parallel ATA. It puts SCSI onto the same serial footing that Fibre Channel has always been on, gives it a new road-map that will see future doubling of throughputs, and ends its reliance on the parallel technology that was running out of steam. It also simplifies cabling, and eliminates what was a 15-device limit on addressing.
Both LSI and IBM claimed that an array loaded with SAS drives will not be hugely more expensive than an array loaded with SATA drives, but it will be much better suited to applications demanding greater reliability.
People have been changing to SATA from Fibre Channel because of the cost savings, but we can offer SAS at very competitive prices, said Yost for IBM.
In fact IBM is not offering SATA as an option for the DS3000s, at least not yet. That situation may change as SAS and SATA drives can be mixed within the same drive shelves.
IBM said that the DS3000 series will scale to 14TB, when using 3.5in 300GB drives. Unlike HP, IBM has not plumped for the smaller 2.5in SAS drives that suit high-IO applications.
The single and dual-controller boxes will feature snapshot, volume replication and partitioning software, and according to LSI can be configured with just ten mouse clicks, using an interface designed to suit SMBs that cannot afford specialized storage staff.
IBM said that it also hopes to sell the devices into large businesses looking for storage devices to handle video data. Among other factors, that hope is based on IBM’s strong presence in the retail industry, and what IBM promised will be the performance and low cost of the arrays.
A single-controller, twin-PSU set-up with no disk will carry a list price of $4,495, and a typical 1TB configuration will cost less than $6,000, IBM said.
