IBM leads fourth quarter market for mainframe storage; strong customer demand for high availability and performance gives IBM number one market share position in 4Q95

Business Wire, Jan 31, 1996

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 31, 1996--Commemorating RAMAC 2's first 100 days of general availability, IBM today announced that it shipped more mainframe storage capacity worldwide than any competitor, including EMC, during the fourth quarter of 1995, according to leading industry analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC's 1995 year-end estimates of terabyte (TB) shipments gave IBM the market share leadership for the quarter with more than 40 percent of the worldwide S/390 market for Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD).

"Our estimates indicate IBM led the nearest competitor by four points in terabyte market share in a quarter characterized by extremely aggressive pricing," said IDC Senior Vice President David Vellante. "The RAMAC Array Family's impact on the market exceeded our expectations, both in the quarter and over the life of the product."

IBM's fourth quarter volume reflects strong customer demand for RAMAC 2 which began shipping to customers only 80 days before the end of the year.

In related news last week, IBM also announced growing success in the highly fragmented open-systems storage market. Its new 7133 Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) Disk Subsystem delivered approximately five percent of all non-RAID storage capacity shipped in 1995 for use with multi-user UNIX-based processors, according to industry estimates of market size.

In just the first four months since introduction, the 7133 shipped more than 3,000 units with an estimated capacity of well over 100 terabytes. The 7133 is the first storage subsystem to implement an industry standard, next-generation, high-speed interface called Serial Storage Architecture (SSA).

Adding to multiplatform support already provided for Hewlett-Packard HP-UX and Sun Microsystem's Solaris/Sun OS operating systems, IBM last week also announced that the 7137 Disk Subsystem -- an entry-level RAID 5 subsystem with a "dial-a-host" function -- has been expanded so that it can now attach to AT&T workstations and servers.

"This is a great scorecard to demonstrate just how quickly IBM can mobilize to capture industry leadership, and a testimonial to our people's ability to meet the incredible growth in worldwide DASD demand projected for 1996 and the emerging world of network-centric computing," said Jim Vanderslice, general manager of the IBM Storage Systems Division.

According to IDC, IBM's 1995 worldwide subsystem revenue surpassed all other DASD storage providers by more than $3 billion. Commenting on the competitiveness of IBM's storage offerings, Vanderslice said, "Customers are voting with their checkbooks for the synergy of our comprehensive solutions. The reliability of IBM's storage and subsystems, especially the dramatic success of RAMAC 2, shows that in spades."

High Performance and Availability Experienced by RAMAC 2 Customers

Data availability is an important differentiator of customer advantages with the RAMAC Array Family. IBM's recognized industry-leading technologies in both high-capacity hard disk drives and RAID 5 data redundancy, gives customers extremely reliable, yet cost-competitive choices.

One of Seattle's premier medical centers, Virginia Mason, requires information to be available around the clock to users. "RAMAC 2 gives us the availability we need," said Glenn Hammar, Virginia Mason's IS director. "Since installing RAMAC 2, we've seen improvement in response time and a significant jump in the number of transactions we can process in a given time."

Data center operational efficiency and performance gains were the most noticeable benefits with RAMAC 2, according to Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada. "With the old storage, we were micromanaging the performance of our disks," said Bob Holden, director, Computing Services. "Now, with the marked improvement in performance we're getting from RAMAC 2, we've eliminated our daily need to monitor data and move it around."

High Data Availability Demonstrated by Independent Study

In an extensive independent survey of over 200 mainframe customer installations throughout the U.S. and Europe, IBM's RAMAC was reported as a leading solution for high data availability according to a December 1995 report by Europe's respected industry analyst firm, Xephon, PLC.

More importantly was the finding that IBM's RAMAC with RAID 5 had far fewer impacts on customer operations as measured in terabyte years. Xephon's measure of impacts per TB year is an effort to account for the time period customers have a particular brand installed so that comparisons can be made over a particular storage device's operating life. A copy of the report is available from Xephon.

RAMAC 2, with up to 180 gigabytes (GB) of storage capacity, uses IBM's advanced 3.5-inch, 4 GB hard disk drives and doubles the capacity of earlier RAMAC arrays. IBM's introduction of RAMAC 2 and plans for future expansions of the architecture, will help to protect customer's storage investment with lower overall costs of ownership and incremental capacity upgrades.