IBM prepares to launch San manager

Summer release for automated storage allocation and management product

IBM's TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC), which was developed in the UK and is part of the company's strategy for automated storage allocation and management, will be released this summer.

The SVC units connect to storage area networks (Sans) to control physical storage.

The product, previously codenamed Lodestone, is expected to have an entry price of about £60,000 for supporting 20 to 25 servers. Resellers believe this will make the rackmounted SVC attractive to SMEs.

Peter Hulme, senior architect at channel storage consultant Sagitta Performance Systems, said SVC gives management of storage at the physical disk level.

"Clients are asking for faster, cheaper storage. It must not fail and has to scale," he said.

Jens Tiedemann, IBM's vice president of marketing for storage software, claimed rapid storage growth and data availability needs means total automation of storage handling is the only option.

"With SVC, we are cutting the umbilical cord from the server to where the data is stored for the first time," he said. "This is the only way to add more storage without taking the system down."

Paul Evans, Sagitta's technical services manager, said SVC's performance is superb and praised its scalability.

He added that the ability for potential customers to do trials of the system without commitment is attractive, but that Sagitta will concentrate initially on migrating over its existing IBM users.

Andy Slater, director at reseller TecTrade, which has trialled the system, said IBM can now deliver end-to-end storage resource management, as part of its vision for storage infrastructure.

Other elements of IBM's roadmap include TotalStorage Common File System software for heterogeneous file-sharing, for release by year-end, a vendor-neutral central device management tool and more advanced storage management.