IBM aims for market leadership with new storage platforms

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 23 August 2006 13:05

IBM plans to shake EMC's hold on the number one spot in the the external disk storage market with the release of a new range of products across the high-end and network storage areas

The star attraction is a new superfast high capacity storage platform called DS8000 Turbo, which can store up to a massive 320 Terabytes of data, runs 15% faster than the previous DS8000 model and has doubled the throughput to 4 Gigabits per second.

At a starting price of US$213,400, the DS8000 Turbo is a storage device for large enterprises with high transactional requirements, such as financial institutions.

In the network storage area, where IBM has an OEM agreement with Network Appliance, IBM has announced the System Storage N7000 Series, which will be made by Net App and rebranded as IBM products.

EMC has been the clear leader in the business storage market for some time. However, IBM has been gradually whittling away the lead to the point where it is now within striking distance.