IBM Pushes Storage Envelope

SAN FRANCISCO - With mushrooming volumes of data, companies will soon have the same problems as an apartment-dwelling shopaholic: too much stuff.

As regulations expand the types of information that has to be stored indefinitely and the social information saved by employees grows exponentially -- think of new-baby photos emailed to everyone in the company -- data centers are reaching a breaking point, says Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM(IBM) Systems Storage.

The volume of data being stored is growing by about 57% a year, says Barry Rudolph, vice president of IBM Storage. About 80% of that data is unstructured -- a type that doesn't fit easily into spreadsheets.

IBM is taking a run at the problem with a set of new and evolved products announced Monday. They comprise a multi-year effort to grapple with the data explosion through a broad range of technologies, the company said. Toward this goal, IBM invested about $2 billion in research and acquisitions, including Cognos and XIV earlier this year. Cognos software helps companies classify and retrieve unstructured data.

Executives declined to estimate revenue expectations from the group of announcements.

While few of IBM's 30 announcements Monday will likely change the game, taken together they tackle the headaches caused by burgeoning data storage centers.

The most intriguing of IBM's announcements is the XIV storage array, says independent technology analyst Charles King, of Pund-IT Research.

The system uses existing industry-standard storage technology -- 180 low-cost, low-speed, high-capacity SATA drives -- but adds sophisticated software, such as data acceleration, to get very high performance out of it.