IBM today announced its industry leading storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, will be packaged for small and medium sized (SMB) businesses, one of the faster growing parts of the storage marketplace.

The IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) software is designed to help improve storage utilization rates, energy efficiency, administrator productivity, availability, and scalability of critical applications. It can help significantly improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information.

As information continues to grow dramatically, SMBs are looking to control costs while also responding to the changing business environment. The new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) Entry Edition helps SMBs manage that growth and improve the return on their storage investments while also helping simplify operations. SVC Entry Edition is built on more affordable hardware intended specifically to run the new SVC Entry Edition software which delivers the same rich functional capabilities as the regular SVC software. As a result, IBM Business Partners already familiar with SVC will immediately be ready to support clients using SVC Entry Edition. SVC Entry Edition is licensed by the number of disk drives virtualized rather than by terabyte to make it more accessible and affordable. With this new type of licensing, IBM Business Partners can easily package new disk storage and SVC together to deliver complete storage solutions to clients.

"Just like enterprise clients, small to medium sized clients must deal with exploding volumes of data that must be stored. With SVC Entry Edition, clients can keep control of storage costs to improve storage utilization, which can help reduce energy consumption for a greener data center," said Jorge Quintero, president, QCM Technologies, Inc. "By offering a more affordable entry price point, QCM Technologies can help meet the demand that our clients have to get the most out of their information infrastructures."

"IBM is dedicated to helping SMB clients improve their information infrastructures through powerful virtualization technology," said Andy Slater, chief operating officer, Tectrade. "With SVC Entry Edition, IBM is enabling Business Partners like Tectrade to address SMB client needs with easy to acquire, competitively priced systems thereby improving the end-to-end mid-market size client experience."

"IBM is committed to delivering the storage offerings and the reseller eco system to help SMB clients satisfy their business needs," said Barry Rudolph, vice president, IBM System Storage. "We have been the leader in storage virtualization since SVC was introduced five years ago, and by incorporating a more accessible and affordable product through our IBM Business Partners we are giving clients what they have been asking for-a way to incorporate green and efficient technologies into their information infrastructures to manage the data center crisis of today."

Storage Virtualization Leadership

Since its introduction in 2003, IBM has shipped over 14,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,600 SVC systems. Complementing the announcement today of SVC Entry Edition, IBM is announcing it has accomplished a new world record SPC disk-based benchmark that demonstrates the extraordinary scalability of SVC and continues IBM's leadership in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. The new benchmark not only beats the previous SVC measurement but does so with IBM's new Space-Efficient Virtual Disk thin provisioning technology enabled. The new SPC-1 benchmark of SVC running with IBM DS4700 disk supports 274,997.58 SPC-1 IOPS per second.

IBM is also announcing the interoperability of SVC with the new IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM System Storage DS5000 and the IBM System z/VSE. New interoperability support for SVC also includes Microsoft Hyper-V, HDS Universal Storage Platform and HP XP20000/XP24000.

SVC Entry Edition is planned to be generally available on November 21.

IBM Global Financing, the lending and leasing business segment of IBM is offering "Why Wait," a no interest no payments for 90 days deferral plan to support eligible customers acquiring IBM System Storage now through the end of 2008. The financing structure is a 36 month fair market value lease. Customers installing the new hardware under the promotion terms make no payments for 90 days, and then make 36 even monthly payments. Customers must be credit qualified, lease the eligible equipment with IBM Global Financing for the promotional term and structure, and install the product in participating countries by Dec 31, 2008. Terms and conditions may vary by country. For information on easy funding options for clients seeking to finance these SVC Entry Edition, visit: www.ibm.com/financing/whywait

About IBM

For more information about IBM's information infrastructure solutions, please visit http://www.ibm.com/storage.