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August 9th, 2006: Big Blue announces its foray into the sub-Enterprise storage arena with a 4Gbps Fibre Channel, sub-US$15k SAN disk array. It has also added SATA capability to its DS4000 system.States.

IBM is going head-to-head with EMC's Clariion AX150 and HP's StorageWorks 1000 Modular Smart Array (MSA 1000) with the announcement of its System Storage DS4200 Express.

According to the company, a one-terabyte (1Tb) system will ship for $USD13,500 and will include the following data management tools:

• FlashCopy backup (also known as point-in-time copies)
• VolumeCopy duplication (entire data set clone)
• Remote mirroring (data backups to remote locations)

At the hardware level, the 3RU (Rack Unit) DS4200 Express features four 4-Gbps fibre channel host ports. Redundant, dual-active intelligent RAID controllers supporting RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, and 10. The unit is capable of scaling to 8Tb of Serial ATA (SATA) disk storage, using optional DS4200 500 GB Enhanced Value Disk Drive Modules (GBPS). This can be increased to 56Tb by attachment of up to six EXP420 Storage Expansion Units.

Also announced by IBM are what it is calling enhancements to its DS4000 Server series in the form of the addition of 500 GB SATA drives to its DS4700, DS4800 and EXP810s.

Although IBM is claiming 'revolutionary' status for these releases, the more intriguing tag would be 'highly competitive' because this illustrates the obvious growth in the mid-market area. Previously the Enterprise level (1,000 employees and up) had been considered the key space for IBM. Demand for storage - for reasons ranging from compliance all the way to the mountains of documents that had traditionally resided in the form of paper, film and audio - is now forcing smaller organisations to re-examine their own requirements. Hewlett Packard and EMC have clearly identified this market and acted upon it. It now appears that IBM is now hungry for SMB dollars.

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