During the SAN World, at the Sofitel Royal Hotel, IBM presents the latest storage and saving technologies set up with its partners. The future today...
According to the Forrester Research Institute, by 2003, 75% of computer expenses of companies will dedicated to storage. IBM has tried to bring new solutions to these problem. These solutions, linked to network storage, are introduced to some 800 customers, partners and prospects at the Mandelieu's Sofitel Hotel, from April 9th to 11th during the SAN World IBM congress.
Optical fibre solutions
'The theme of the show is the future today,says Daniel Sazbon, in charge of the organization of the event and La Gaude SAN sales manager for Europe, Middle-East, Africa. We bring storage solutions which can allow companies to deal with e-business. We realize that, as far as storage is concerned, needs are growing exponentially. On the other hand, costs cannot grow as much as these needs. In order to control costs, IBM and its partners (there are 25 partners among which Cisco, Brocade, McData, etc.) have set up new technologies around optical fibre. Such technologies allow heterogeneous server plat-forms to federate storage.'
An example for a big distribution chain which would be equipped with Sun, IBM, HP and other servers. Technologies which are presented allow it to federate its storage on these various kinds of server and to save data. The advantage of optical fibre is the possibility to link servers separated by a longer distance. Copper wires only allow a 25 meter distance. With the optical fibre we can go to 10 km while transfer rates can be doubled. Thus, the company can widen storage and data saving geographically.'
Thus, SAN solutions (Storage Area Network) and NAS solutions (network Attached Storage) allow to increase the storage capacity by limiting cost explosion. Among customer testimonies in SAN World, the case of a company which has declared having saved 70% of infrastructure and cabling expenses by substituting its former copper system by optical fibre. Or even the case of another company which, by these new technologies, has strengthen twelve big servers with a storage of 200 Terabits (200.00 gigabits) and has reduced the exploitation cost by 25%.