IBM Corp., is adding a virtual bite to its Shark Enterprise Storage Server.
Big Blue and DataCore Software Corp., Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., announced a reseller agreement under which IBM and its worldwide resellers will sell DataCore's SANsymphony storage networking software to IBM TotalStorage Shark customers.
Under the agreement, IBM Enterprise Storage Server customers will now be able to take advantage of SANsymphony's IP-based disk mirroring and other storage management functions.
IBM said DataCore's SANsymphony software can help Shark customers improve disaster tolerance and total cost of ownership.
Randy Kerns, partner and analyst for the Greenwood, Colo.-based firm valuator Group, Inc., said while IBM has not made much noise about the deal, it is a significant competitive move.
"I think this is a major deal," said Kerns. "The competition is delivering [virtualization] now and IBM would not be able to compete with a complete solution. For DataCore, the IBM deal gives them much more visibility and credibility and should greatly increase their market presence."
Storage virtualization enables things like policy automation where a set of policies or rules can be defined to act upon for storage. These policies can include functions such as automatic provisioning; performance defined movement of data and replicated copies of data. According to Kerns, the automation in turn significantly drives down the cost of
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managing storage and reduces the potential for human error.
According to the companies, DataCore's storage management software can improve long-distance data protection and additional disk drive management capabilities for the Enterprise Storage Server when used by IBM eServer xSeries and Windows 2000 or NT server customers.
DataCore said the deal is evidence that virtualization is finally making it possible to integrate SAN-based storage with installed storage systems.
DataCore's SANsymphony software will be available for purchase from IBM or authorized IBM Business Partners beginning November 23.
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