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IBM's Launches New Storage Infrastructure Initiatives: Page 2 of 3

Management of Storage -- A new version of Tivoli Storage Productivity Center delivers advanced performance analytics technology and customization features that enable increased overall system performance, reduced management complexities, and improved system availability. The new analytics technology from IBM Research identifies hot spots for problem determination and quick tuning to improve performance and storage utilization by up to 90%. In addition, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, v4.1 takes advantage of the company's NovusCG acquisition to greatly expand storage management reporting capabilities to multiple heterogeneous storage solutions, such as from EMC, Hitachi, HP and NetApp.

Remote data protection -- IBM's continuous data protection capability, which, with its ability to restore data to any point-in time, delivers zero data loss, is now available on a remote basis through Global Technology Services on an IBM hosted data center.

Solid state storage -- Last year IBM showed off a new SSD architecture in an impressive demonstration called Quicksilver. IBM continues its strong focus on solid-state storage, notably flash-based sold state drives (SSDs). The company announced SSD options for Power servers and its enterprise-class DS8000 storage systems. Still, IBM views this as only the beginning as further work still needs to be done on workload monitoring, smart data placement through automation, and advanced server and storage system architectures to further exploit faster devices.

IBM Global Financing -- In these tough economic times, funding and even access to credit is difficult. IBM is facilitating the sale of its storage products and services using its financial muscle in a creative and interesting way. IBM recognizes that in tight financial times customers may not have the budgetary dollars to invest in new IT initiatives even though those initiatives can show what would normally be an acceptable ROI. Typically, the initial cost outlay for projects initially exceeds their financial benefits. To help cash-strapped customers deal with this issue, IBM Global Financing is allowing customers to make minimal payments during the early stages of a project, then more during the later stages when the benefits have started to kick in. This should help make some borderline projects economically feasible, which benefits both customers and IBM.

Not all announcements need to be blockbusters to be effective. IBM is attacking along a number of fronts in its storage-related announcements so attention is not focused on just one product. However, each particular product announcement is useful to a particular customer segment, which can benefit from the new or enhanced capabilities. And that is what IBM hopes to achieve from this set of announcements.