That's all to the good but a bigger practical effect though is that the DS8800 can support more drives, from 1,056 to 1,024, in only 60 percent of the floor space of the previous generation DS8700, as well as using 36 percent less energy. That's a good green sales point but IBM has also introduced some other green improvements in the DS8800 with front-to-back cooling that enables more efficient airflow and improves the energy efficiency in data centers moving to hot-aisle-cold-aisle designs. All in all the DS8800 may not be totally new since it utilizes same basic architecture and management capabilities as previous DS8000 generations which is a good thing from the perspective on enterprise-class customers, but it certainly is "improved."
As an IT vendor, IBM currently emphasizes three strategic growth initiatives: Smarter Planet, Business Analytics & Cloud Computing. Of course, storage innovations play a key role in all these efforts, such as in delivering advanced archiving features and scale-out NAS. That said, IBM is "old school" in that it focuses on the basics in technical innovation for storage, such as delivering measurably better system performance, scalability, efficiency, and integration. That is in contrast to "new school" vendors which tend to emphasize different features and functions, such as stages of virtualization. Each approach has its merits and it will be interesting to see how the competitive battles shape up.
From IBM's "old school" perspective, innovative storage is all about providing customers the capabilities that they need to meet changing and growing business requirements. IT organizations will have to look not only on the surface, but also under the hood to see how the DS8800 measures up for performance, scalability, efficiency, and integration. The DS8800 continues to give enterprise customers the binary compatibility and robustness that they have come to expect while at the same offering such improved capabilities as floor space and energy efficiencies.
IBM is currently a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.
