IBM's Shark Takes A Bite.

StorageTek bares teeth

On Monday, July 26, IBM made "the most important product announcement that our storage systems group has made in the last five years," according to a company executive. The product, codenamed Shark and apparently being offered under the Shark name, is "the biggest, fastest, most reliable storage product in the market." Shark will be an entire package--hardware, software and services provided by IBM, because IBM's "customers don't want to be integrators," Frank Elliott, IBM's vice president of marketing and strategy, said.

Shark will offer "extreme performance" with integrated performance accelerators. Users will have access to volumes in parallel; this allows applications to go through one server to get to a volume of data [on another server]." The parallel approach is designed to reduce bottlenecks that can occur when data is accessed from multiple storage servers. "Multiple allegiance will allow another application in another server [to] access the same volume of data" Elliott said.

"Shark will have extensive connectivity," Elliott continued. "You can attach [Shark] to System 390...and to non-IBM servers ... if it's in an Unix or NT environment you can attach [Shark]" Elliott said. "We'll take on all comers. One of our early support machines in Europe is connected to an SGI [Silicon Graphics, Inc.] computer and it works. [Shark will work with] in any standard SCSI of Fibre Channel connected environment," Elliott noted.

Shark can be configured to provide a user defined level of virtual storage. "None of the box has to be virtual. Customers can choose in four increments of: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and total virtual. This provides flexibility for customers who will take advantage of the virtual architecture," Elliott said.

Ongoing software upgrades will be available and are expected to further improve performance, while also increasing storage capacity by increasing levels of data compression in the Shark system. For the past three years, IBM has captured 86% of the installed base of "virtual disk" customers through an OEM agreement with StorageTek, according to materials provided by StorageTek. The total installed base of virtual disk customers, according to StorageTek, is 5,000 units or approximately 27% of the enterprise disk market.

IBM's announcement of Shark brings IBM away from the OEM business and enables IBM to sell a "home grown" storage product. According to a StorageTek representative, "StorageTek has known from the beginning (1996) that it would eventually go head-to-head with IBM. In January (StorageTek) resumed direct sales to enterprise disk customers and in April launched the Shared Disk Array, a virtual disk subsystem that also connects to Unix servers."

On the same day as IBM's big announcement, StorageTek made some announcements of its own. A "Step Up" campaign offered expansion of capabilities and assumption of IBM warranties and service agreements to users of IBM RAMAC Virtual Array and StorageTek Shared Virtual Array (9393) disk systems.

The "Step Up" campaign will offer functional and performance enhancements for users of the StorageTek manufactured systems. These enhancements include "capacity and performance boosts, support for integrated software products that fully leverage virtual disk architecture such as SnapShot and High Speed Data Mover and a forthcoming connection to open systems servers," according to a StorageTek release.

StorageTek also matched IBM's three-year warranty on Shark with a three-year warranty of its own. IBM's move away from an OEM-provided product to a product that it developed and will manufacture can impact StorageTek's business, but the StorageTek announcements, planned to coincide with IBM's Shark launch, make it clear that they've got a plan to retain an existing base of users of StorageTek developed equipment, while also attempting to enlarge their market.

During the Q&A following IBM's prepared announcement of Shark, Elliott was asked how Shark would affect IBM's relationship with StorageTek. Elliott noted that a relationship between the two companies "will continue." He pointed out that IBM sells hard drives to StorageTek and in what may be the most optimistic statement of the morning predicted that IBM's move from an OEM product provided by StorageTek to a competing product manufactured by IBM "shouldn't affect our relationship at all."

IBM is "very serious about being a leader in Enterprise storage. FOR SURE. How long before we can become the leader? I don't know. It can be short or long, but we're in it for any timeframe," Elliott noted.

IBM's three year warranty, and "very aggressive financing" of Shark may help earn its market. The systems will be priced at around 25-27 cents per megabyte, and will be supported by IBM.