Storage Technology Inc is setting in motion a three-pronged defense against IBM Corp, which launches its new Shark disk arrays today at a press conference in New York. After several years of rebadging Storagetek systems as its own Ramac Virtual Array product line, IBM is now re-entering the market with home made systems. But to do so, claims Storagetak, it needs to take one step back before going forward. IBM has developed its own virtual architecture which it uses on its RS/6000-based Virtual Storage Servers, but hasn’t yet completed the work on supporting S/390 mainframes as well as Unix, NT and AS/400s in the same system. That will have to wait until the next version of Shark, due out next year.
The three-year relationship between IBM and Storagetek fell apart earlier this year (CI No 3,651) and Storagetek re-entered the market under its own name with its 9393 Shared Virtual Array disk storage drives in April. Storagetek never offered its storage area network interconnect or storage administration software to IBM. It claims sales of the new systems are going well, with a 400% increase in shipments between the first and second quarters in the US, and a 200% increase in Europe. There are now 8,000 systems on the market, 86% of them using Storagetek’s Snapshot remote copy software.
The three-point plan, which StorageTek calls its Stepup campaign, includes an option for IBM Ramac users to upgrade to a Storagetek system as an alternative to IBM, along with a doubling in capacity from 8.3Gb to 1.7Tb, and the extension of the warranty from one to three years. We’re telling the people who have made a commitment to virtual storage as an architecture they can upgrade and extend using Virtual Array, and if they chose we will assume maintenance of existing systems said a Storagetek spokesperson. The extended warranty lowers the total cost of ownership.
Snapshot, which relies on the virtual architecture, won’t be included on the new Sharks, and instead IBM is expected to offer Flash Copy, which holds the data in cache. That’s ok if the cache is large enough, says StorageTek, but after that shadow files have to be used which means a lot of overhead. It claims EMC Corp’s TimeFinder uses similar techniques and has similarly high overheads in terms of hidden disk space. In the same way, says StorageTek, Shark’s Concurrent Copy feature, already out on System 390 drives, was upgraded on the Ramac virtual architecture to include integration with Snapshot, but IBM has now had to revert back to its original version on the Shark.
Storagetek claims that IBM will detail the technical benefits of Shark, such as its new I/O structure, and some new software giving detailed information about what’s going on inside the physical disk array, rather than talking about the business benefits. We want to hide all that from the user said the spokesperson. Some form of conversion will be needed to get back onto virtual architecture, when it re-emerges from IBM next year.
Meanwhile, StorageTek believes that IBM on Monday will quietly upgrade its existing Ramac systems, still sourced from StorageTek, as an option for those who aren’t ready to move over to the new – but in StorageTek’s eyes the more traditional – Shark architecture. The OEM agreement between the two officially ends at the end of 2000.
