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15 Dec 2003
IBM is hoping to entice customers away from rival EMC, following its announcement of an aggressive storage migration scheme called Piper.
Big Blue has provided more than 100 consultants and technologists with the new tool, which integrates a set of cost analysis and data migration tools.
As part of the programme, IBM Business Partners have also gained access to the company's data migration tools, services and support in an attempt to increase channel sales and extend the reach of IBM's TotalStorage solutions.
Further reading
IBM claims Piper can migrate EMC customers across to its hardware with no downtime. Fujitsu and Hitachi Data Systems are also on IBM's target list.
This will come as a blow for EMC which, according to analyst firm IDC, has lost market share to IBM for the second consecutive quarter in total worldwide factory revenue attributable to disk storage systems.
IBM has introduced the ease-of-migration tool because it said firms are postponing or cancelling storage migration programmes as a result of concerns over network disruption and downtime.
"One of the main concerns businesses have is the risk of migrating over to a new storage system. Piper removes this risk," said Tony Cox, storage consultant at IBM Global Services.
Simon Gay, consultancy practice leader at Computacenter, which provides corporates with IBM and EMC storage systems, welcomed the move toward easier migration, but said customers are more focused on virtual solutions than specific vendor hardware.
"Vendors are trying to take competitors' share, but it does not move things on. Supportability, integration and virtualisation are what customers are looking for, and vendors need to offer this," he said.
Gay added that firms are looking to discard storage hardware and adopt more virtualisation storage products that allow enterprises to be charged via on-demand use.
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