Business Services Industry

IBM Announces NUMA-Q e-business solutions using 'Shark' Enterprise Storage Server

Business Wire, Feb 17, 2000

Business &Technology Editors

Enterprise Solutions Summit

SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 17, 2000

IBM today announced immediate availability of its top-performing &uot;Shark&uot; Enterprise Storage Server for Intel-based NUMA-Q(R) systems. The addition of Shark enables the company to offer leading e-business solutions based on a combination of the world's most advanced server and storage technology.

&uot;NUMA-Q's high availability architecture, massive scalability and performance are a perfect complement to Enterprise Storage Server. Together, these products offer a SAN solution that can stand up to the most demanding e-businesses solutions including business intelligence and customer relationship management,&uot; said Walter Raizner, vice president of marketing, IBM Storage Subsystems Division. &uot;The addition of Shark as a choice for NUMA-Q customers brings them a powerful, highly scalable and cost-effective storage solution with connectivity across mainframe, midrange and data center server platforms.&uot;

NUMA-Q and Shark ESS together offer superior scalability for e-business applications, and performance for the dollar that is more than 30 percent higher than other leading solutions, especially for demanding applications which depend on high availability, high performance and the ability to support massive growth. NUMA-Q is built on IBM's industry leading NUMA architecture, is scalable from 4 to 64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors and is able to support storage ranging from 100GB to 500TB.

The NUMA-Q multi-path multi-port capability makes it an industry leading platform for SANs. The capability is used to create high performance fault tolerant, redundant systems. The multi-port capability in Shark allows all ports to access any disk in a subsystem. This maximizes I/O by evenly distributing it over all available interface ports, dramatically increasing bandwidth utilization and availability.

All NUMA-Q systems are fibre channel based and feature the industry's only UNIX(R) operating system supporting multi-pathed, multi-ported fibre channel. The system, which began shipping in 1997, was the first server able to operate in a switched-fabric fibre-channel SAN and continues to be the leading platform for large-scale storage area networks.

About Enterprise Storage Server

The Enterprise Storage Server, code-named Shark, is the groundbreaking storage solution from IBM, the world leader in storage systems, software, services and technology. Built on the foundation of IBM's Seascape Storage Enterprise Architecture, `Shark' works with heterogeneous hosts and operating systems -- Windows(R) NT, UNIX, S/390(R) and AS/400(R) -- and with a variety of interfaces, including Fibre Channel, Ultra SCSI and ESCON. `Shark' incorporates such unique technology as Parallel Access Volumes (PAV) and Multiple Allegiance, currently unavailable in competing systems from EMC, Hitachi Data and Compaq.

For more information on the Enterprise Storage Server and its performance advantages over competing products, visit www.ibm.com/storage.> About NUMA-Q servers

NUMA-Q servers are the leader in scalable Intel-based solutions for e-business. IBM NUMA-Q servers are optimized for the scalability availability and manageability requirements of large and rapidly growing e-business infrastructures. There are more than 10,000 NUMA-Q installations worldwide, including some of the world's largest and most sophisticated business intelligence, CRM and ERP environments. For further information about NUMA-Q servers, phone (800) 257-9044 or visit our web site at http://www.ibm.com/servers.> Trademarks

IBM, Seascape, Enterprise Storage Server, Netfinity, and NUMA-Q are registered trademarks or trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation or its wholly owned subsidiaries. UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group in the U.S. and other countries. Windows and Windows NT are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.