Marketplace Trends in IBM Storage

Many data center professionals continue to choose IBM for their storage requirements and articulate the same reasons for staying "true blue:"

• Their processors are IBM and they prefer to negotiate with a single vendor
• Choosing IBM means fewer maintenance CEs to manage
• The IBM footprint and vision is consistent with future growth plans
• IBM does a fine job of delivering new technology that is consistent with anticipated user needs.

The market for tape and disk products is still as important today as it was a few years ago. Since the tragedy of 9/11, many companies are focused on protecting their environments with adequate disaster recovery facilities. Even more, since the federal regulations enacted as a result of Enron and WorldCom, users are growing their storage requirements to be fully compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley laws.

In regards to the latter federal requirements, most data center professionals are placing greater interest and attention on encrypted data storage. In the event that hardware is inadvertently removed from a data center before the data can be successfully removed, new hardware with encryption technology is quickly gaining interest in the market. More specifically, The IBM 3592 EO5 tape drives, for mainframes, and the 3588 F4As, for distributed, are becoming increasingly popular. However, they are still readily available in the used marketplace.

Although STK has developed and offering disk storage with encryption technology, IBM has not yet made available this technology for disk storage. Yet, we understand it is coming very soon.

Lastly, it should be said that there are still many clients using 3490, 36-track technology. The reason is simple: It takes a great deal of time, effort and resources to move from this older technology to the newer 3590 technology. That said, there is still significant market demand for the older 3490 technology and fair market values are fairly aggressive in comparison to the newer 3590 products.

If you're able to upgrade to the newer 3590 technology, there are some extremely good deals out there right now for this technology.

The refurbished market is also a great place right now for good pricing and availability of IBM disk storage such as Shark 2105s, FASt T disk arrays and also the newer DSxxxx series.

In regards to LTO technology, here's some background detail that may be of assistance to you:

Ultrium LTO (Linear Tape Open) technology was created by a joint partnership between IBM, HP and Seagate (now Quantum) to provide a logical and practical choice in an increasingly complex open systems tape environment. LTO technology was designed to have an open format to provide the user with multiple products - all having compatibility between different vendors.