IBM Launches the Industry's Most Advanced Storage System for the Enterprise; Also Increases Performance of Industry-Leading Tape Storage Products

Business Wire, July 26, 1999

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 26, 1999--

IBM today announced the IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) -- code-named "Shark" -- a new generation of enterprise disk storage systems designed to provide world-class performance, scalability and universal access to data across all enterprise computing environments. With the introduction of the Enterprise Storage Server, IBM is reasserting its position as the most comprehensive and innovative supplier of storage solutions in the industry.

The IBM Enterprise Storage Server is the new flagship of the company's continually growing line of open hardware and software solutions for enterprise storage and data management. Built on the foundation of IBM's Seascape(1) Storage Enterprise Architecture, the Enterprise Storage Server is designed to exploit IBM leadership in storage technologies to meet the growing data management needs of enterprise customers.

According to Ron Kilpatrick, general manager of IBM Storage Systems Division, e-business, enterprise resource planning, data mining and business intelligence applications are focusing customers on the importance of storage and information management to their enterprises. "There is tremendous business value in the massive amounts of stored data that already exist -- and are being created every second. IBM's Seascape architecture addresses the challenges of managing that information and data explosion. The Enterprise Storage Server completes the Seascape Family with a powerful, high-end disk solution for the enterprise. Now, our enterprise customers have a new choice for their growing disk storage requirements.

"While other storage suppliers attempt to eke out new functionality from aging storage architectures, the ESS offers customers real choices when designing an enterprise storage infrastructure for the future," said Kilpatrick. "With the Enterprise Storage Server, IBM is delivering a clear vision and technology road map that customers can count on as they continue to implement data-intensive applications."

The Enterprise Storage Server is designed to grow with customers' needs and to easily incorporate the latest storage innovations. It incorporates a "snap-in" design that allows users to add capacity, performance and connectivity over time using the same platform. This design allows customers to evolve their storage systems well into the future, making the ESS particularly well-suited to server and storage consolidation activities and offering unparalleled investment protection.

Unmatched features and function

The Enterprise Storage Server builds upon IBM's Storage Area Network (SAN) initiative announced last month. SANs are separate networks of storage devices dedicated to managing and storing data without tying up the computing resources of the server. The Seascape architecture, with its powerful storage server and modular technology building blocks, is ideally suited to the emerging world of SANs.

The IBM Enterprise Storage Server offers customers scalability and performance second to none: it can scale from 420 gigabytes to over 11 terabytes, by far the highest capacity in the industry. The performance of the system is even more impressive -- with two four-way symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and a large cache with additional nonvolatile (battery-backed) memory. Most important, though, is its ability to work with heterogeneous hosts -- S/390, UNIX, Windows NT and AS/400 -- and with a variety of interfaces, including ESCON, Fibre Channel and Ultra SCSI. "This combination of performance, openness and flexibility is unprecedented in the world of high-end disk storage systems. Redundant hardware and components provide added reliability. Now customers on all platforms can expect to receive unsurpassed availability," said Kilpatrick.

Other features, such as IBM's industry standard Peer-to-Peer Remote Copy (PPRC) and FlashCopy functions, as well as the new, innovative Parallel Access Volumes technology, are already winning extremely high praise with customers, software application vendors and industry analysts (Editors: Quote sheet). Recent benchmark testing at Prudential Securities resulted in a substantial performance improvement when compared to a competitor's current flagship offering.(2)

"Based on our initial testing of the new performance accelerators on the IBM Enterprise Storage Server, this new offering appears to have the throughput necessary for implementing our new business continuation strategy," said William H. Anderson, executive vice president and CIO, Information Systems & Communications Division, Prudential Securities Incorporated. "One of our key criteria for this kind of system was performance, and since we've installed it, we have been impressed with its speed. In addition, it's very easy to manage. Altogether, we are happy to be implementing such an extraordinary system at Prudential Securities."

Team IBM

The ability to bring advanced storage technology to the market is the result of IBM's uniquely broad experience in enterprise storage. "Quite simply, no other vendor has IBM's breadth of storage expertise in disk and tape subsystems, storage management software, hard disk drive technology, systems integration and support services. Many competitors in the storage industry have only one card to play -- they are disk storage companies, tape companies or software companies. No other vendor can bring together such a full suite of hardware and software solutions to market -- backed by the world's largest service and support organization -- as IBM," said Kilpatrick.