History 2000: IBM Betting High on SAN

All the major computer manufacturers such as Compaq, Dell or Hewlett-Packard have wasted little time positioning themselves in the SAN market.

IBM won’t be the last either. It plans to put no less than $400 million on the table, and will expand its storage solutions force with 1,000 sales specialists, to set up 50 SAN solution centers with business partners worldwide, along with new SAN testing facilities in Montpellier, France, and Mankuhari, Japan, in addition to those already in place in Mainz, Germany, and Gaithersburg, MD.

The Mainz center is able to process 10,000 MIPS and has 13TB of disk storage and enough fibre-optic cabling to stretch remote copy scenarios as from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Madrid, Spain.

Montpellier will have 12TB for its trials. A French SAN demonstration center in La Gaude, near Nice, will also be opened in cooperation with wholesaler Distrilogie.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 147 on April 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.