IBM introduces new 2G bit/sec. Fibre Channel server

Computerworld - IBM announced today it will begin shipping a new storage server that provides 2G bit/sec. Fibre Channel connectivity, as well as enhanced network-attached storage and Internet protocol storage products aimed at the midrange market.

IBM's new FastT700 server can perform enterprise-class functions such as remote copy and FlashCopy or point-in-time capabilities, and the company said the server can perform up to 120,000 cached I/O operations per second -- more than double EMC Corp.'s comparable Clariion 4700 server.

Anne MacFarland, director of research at the The Clipper Group Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., said the FastT700 is an attractive offering because of an "affordable entry point" that's slightly lower than EMC's Clariion product and because it supports advanced storage functions.

"The FastT product line is an established line, with a loyal customer base," MacFarland said. "It's easy just to look at high-end product lines, but one of the strengths of IBM has been its product line for [midmarket] customers."

The FastT700, which can scale up to 16TB of storage, supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Novell NetWare and Red Hat Linux environments.

Linda Sanford, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Storage Systems Group, said the products are all about "delivering open and interoperable solutions designed to enable universal access to data for customers of all sizes."

The IBM announcement trails Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC's announcement Monday of four new software products for tying various vendors' networked storage products into a configuration that can be managed and allocated to various departments and workgroups from a single console (see story).

Bob Samson, worldwide vice president of sales and operations for the storage sytsems group at IBM, said the company will also stop reselling Compaq Computer Corp.'s MA8000 Modular Storage Array.

The reseller agreement penned last year said Compaq would sell IBM's enterprise-class "Shark" storage array while working on interoperability with the technology giant.

Now that IBM has its own midrange products -- the FastT 700 and FastT500 servers -- it no longer sees the need to resell Compaq's box, Samson said. He also admitted that some customers were playing the two companies against each other.

"Whenever you have products in the marketplace that are not sufficiently differentiated you're going to have some of that going on," Samson said. "We've got a family of products now and we plan to continue to grow our share there, and we're still going to work on the interoperability side with Compaq."

IBM also announced that its TotalStorage network-attached storage (NAS) models 200 and 300 servers will now provide