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 Ooi
Sze Kai, brand executive, Storage Systems Group, IBM ASEAN/SA,
is responsible for the sales of IBM’s storage family across
the ASEAN/SA region. He spoke to Prashant L Rao about the
increasing importance of software and services in storage,
Shark, and how IBM keeps breaking storage records by squeezing
more data onto the same area
What’s the role of software and services in storage?
Storage
hardware is being marginalised. Services and software are
gaining importance. Today they account for 30 percent of the
storage pie. This will tilt the other way in 2-3 years since
hardware is getting cheaper. Recognising this, we merged our
storage hardware divisions and created a storage software
group.
We have three initiatives in storage software Linux-based
storage virtualisation, which takes care of block aggregation
between an application and the storage device; Storage Tank,
a file system optimised for sharing data such as e-mail or
CRM data, and Open Management Interface based on SNIA, which
offers browser-based storage management of any network, software
or application.
Shark has been IBM’s flagship in enterprise storage.
How is it doing?
IBM
has shipped 10,000 Shark products since its debut in October
1999. Of these, 280 are in ASEAN, 10 percent of which are
in India. A Shark unit can scale up to 22 terabytes today.
Storage capacities are constantly rising. What’s the
average capacity being shipped today?
100
GB is the entry-level today with 400 to 800 GB being small
deals. 1 to 10 terabytes would be a medium-sized deal, with
a large deal ranging from 20 to 30 terabytes.
What are the steps that need to be taken before the concept
of ‘storage
on tap’ becomes a reality?
The
first step is to achieve storage virtualisation in order to
be able to access data anywhere and from any storage device.
This also involves moving more intelligence into storage networks.
In this regard, we are encouraged by the fact that the storage
industry is taking notice of the recent announcement of the
IBM storage software roadmap.
Autonomic storage is the equivalent of our eLiza initiative
in servers for storage. A user should be able to plug his
client into a wall plug and use storage as a utility. This
will be policy driven and completely virtualised.
What are IBM’s initiatives to reduce the number of
administrators required to manage a given volume of storage?
Analysts
predict that for every dollar spent on IT systems acquisition,
you will need to spend $8 to manage the systems. Therefore,
IBM has always put ease-of-management as a top design criteria,
taking many initiatives to maintain a single look-and-feel
management software across all our storage offerings. We are
committed to developing our products to be managed by and
to provide management through the use of open standards. Our
recent announcement in the storage software roadmap for an
open standard-based management interface exemplifies this
commitment. This approach uses SNIA’s (Storage Network
Industries Association) CIM object model and XML over HTTP
to provide a common management approach for storage devices.
This was demonstrated at the Storage Networking World in April
2002.
Is there a physical limit to how much data can be squeezed
onto a disk platter?
This
is a question of physics and there is definitely a finite
number that one can reach. However, this physical limit is
always being challenged by technological breakthroughs that
are taking place on a regular basis. IBM is always looking
for breakthroughs to stay ahead of its competitors. For example,
IBM was the first to introduce a micro drive where you can
have 1 GB storage on a platter the size of a normal human
thumb.
In May 2001, IBM announced a revolutionary new type of magnetic
coating that is expected to quadruple the data density of
current hard disk drive products. ‘PIXIE DUST’,
known technically as antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media
is expected to permit hard disk drives to store 100 billion
bits of data per square inch of disk area by 2003.
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