Well, it's Tuesday again, and that means IBM announcements! Right on the heels of our big storage launch on February 9, today IBM announced some exciting options for its modular disk systems. Let's take a look:

2TB SATA-II drives

That's right, you can now DOUBLE your capacity with 2TB SATA type-II drives on the DS3950, DS4200, DS4700, DS5020, DS5100 and DS5300 disk controllers, as well as the DS4000 EXP420, EXP520, EXP810, EXP5000 and EXP5060 expansion drawers. Here are the Announcement Letters for the [HVEC] and [AAS] ordering systems.

300GB Solid State Drives

IBM also announces 300GB solid state drives (SSD) for the DS5100 and DS5300. These are four times larger than the 73GB drives IBM offered last year, for those workloads that need high read IOPS such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. Here is the [Announcement Letter].

New N series model N3400

For customers that need less than the minimum 21TB that our IBM Scale-Out Network Attach Storage (SONAS) can provide, IBM offers the new N3400 unified storage disk system, with support for NFS, CIFS, iSCSI and FCP. This is a 2U high 12 drive model that can be expanded up to 136 drives, basically doubling all the stats from last year's N3300 model. Fellow blogger, Rich Swain (IBM), does a great job recapping the speeds and feeds over on his blog [News and Information about IBM N series].

It also appears that the reports and rumors of the death of the DS6800 are premature. Don't believe misleading statements from competitors, such as those found written by fellow blogger BarryB (EMC), aka "the Storage Anarchist", in his latest post [Bring Out Your Dead] showing a cute little tombstone with "Feb 2010" on the bottom. Actually, if he had bothered to read IBM's [Announcement Letter], he would have realized that IBM plans to continue to sell these until June. Of course, IBM will continue to support both new and existing DS6800 customers for many years to come.

Technically, BarryB does not make any factually incorrect statements for me to correct on his blog. The idea that a product is "dead" is, of course, just opinion, and competitors poke fun at each others' announcements every day. One could argue that the EMC V-Max was "dead" after the ITG whitepaper [Cost/Benefit Case for IBM XIV Storage System - Comparing Costs for IBM XIV and EMC V-Max Systems] demonstrated that the IBM XIV cost 63 percent less than a comparable EMC V-Max over the life of three years total cost of ownership (TCO) back in July 2009. The comparison was made with data from clients in a variety of industries including manufacturing, health care, life sciences, telecommunications, financial services, and the public sector.  This could explain why so many EMC customers are buying or investigating the IBM XIV and the rest of the IBM storage portfolio.

technorati tags: announcements, exp420, exp520, ds5300, exp5060, exp810, ds6800, ds5020, ds3950, ds4200, ds4700, ds5100, ds4000, exp5000, ds6000, DS6800, XIV, EMC, Barry Burke, BarryB, V-Max

Tags:  ds4700 ds6000 emc exp5060 ds5020 ds3950 ds4000 barryb ds6800 exp810 ds4200 exp420 xiv ds5300 ds5100 exp520 barry+burke v-max exp5000 announcements