If it's storage, it's got to be IBM

At least that's what IBM wants its customers to believe. The company took
representatives from some prospective customers and its partner organizations to
the exotic city of Miyazaki in Japan from the 22nd to the 24th May, 2005. The
objective was to create awareness about its comprehensive storage offerings and
how it was geared to take its customers to the next level of infrastructure
management.

The conference, which was called the 'IBM AP TotalStorage Customer Summit
2005' had over 400 attendees. McData, Brocade and Cisco were the co-sponsors
for this event. The presence of all these companies under a single roof was
targeted at bolstering the confidence of the attending members that there is a
concerted effort to integrate multi-product and multi-vendor storage management
solutions.

Its APac disk business grew 28% year on year in this period, while market
grew at a=3%. IBM attributes part of this success to the launch of the new
DS8000, which comes with a four-year warranty. The company has also started
bagging orders, especially from India, for another new product-the DS4800.

IBM also stressed upon the fact that virtualization will be a key driver in
industry growth over the next few years. It outlined its technology roadmap in
this space, highlighting the business advantages of moving up to storage
virtualization, going beyond SAN/NAS solutions. Steve Legg, Chief Architecture,
IBM Storage said that these integrated solutions will encompass not just IBM's
product suites, but those of its competitors as well.

The venue for the IBM Total Storage 2005 Summit at Miyazaki, Japan

Another initiative that IBM was aggressively promoted was its 'On-Demand
Business' strategy.

Andy Monshow, GM, IBM Total Storage remarked, "On-demand business
requires access to information-information that empowers organizations to lower
TCO." He added that virtualization will do to the storage business what
Linux did to servers.

IBM has identified several business challenges for organizations like growth,
faster time to market for its products and services, access to information by
authorized personnel, measurable results and a predictable ROI. At the same time
there are some inhibitors including explosion of data, compliance guidelines,
infrastructure complexity, management costs and inflexible architectures.

Keeping this scenario in mind, IBM believes that virtualization will ease
most of these problems confronting solution providers and CIOs globally.
Virtualization will provide instant access to information, while reducing cost
and complexity. It will also increase speed and agility, even as customers have
the choice to move from one vendor to another, over the existing infrastructure.
This is precisely why IBM is putting its strength behind its TotalStorage DS
range, which enables virtualization.

But while IBM is busy propounding on its plans for storage virtualization,
its customers are unsure how to view this new initiative. Rajesh Dangi, Delivery
Manager, Infrastructure and Environment Group, Covansys India felt that it
should first work on making its existing storage solutions OS-independent.
"IBM's servers still rely heavily on the OS for its function. I would
rather that they work on coming out with a comprehensive solution, including
homegrown software, which will make it a single-point of contact for any service
issues," he noted.

(The writer was hosted in Miyazaki, Japan by IBM)