IBM was the first company in the world to present a magnetic disk for storing data. That was in 1956, and the capacity of the RAMAC 350 was about 5 Mbytes. That was enough to store all William Shakespeare's works.

Since then, digital storage has developed somewhat. IBM's latest offerings could store all Shakespeare's works -- in 76 million copies.

Though it pioneered digital data storage, IBM failed to protect its lead in the mushrooming sector.

"Until the 1990s, we controlled 90 percent of the storage market," says Andy Monshaw, general manager of IBM Storage Systems, in a conversation with TheMarker during a lightening-fast visit to Israel. TheMarker is a business and technology publication based in Tel Aviv.

Monshaw, who runs a unit responsible for US$2.5 billion in annual sales, admits that IBM made a series of mistakes in the 1990s and saw most of the market slip between its corporate fingers. By 1999, the pioneer had only 7 percent of the world storage market.

Monshaw joined IBM in 1984 at the tender age of 21. He ran IBM Europe's PC business until it was sold to Lenovo, and also served as financial officer for the IBM Systems and Technology division.

In 2005 he moved to the stuttering Storage division, and went to war with giants such as EMC, which had overtaken IBM at a stroll.

"During the last three years we took back 10 percent of the market share we'd lost," Monshaw says, adding that IBM reached a market share, worldwide, of 17 percent.

Also, for the first time it passed HP in sales of external storage technology. At present IBM is second in the list of external-storage device sales, with revenues of $2.5 billion a year, he says.

Monshaw doesn't seem satisfied to be in second place, though. Just mention market-leader EMC and he turns belligerent: Now his division's aim is to close that gap and overtake That Company. "We're only 7 percent away, having closed 11 percent since 2000."

We'll know whether Monshaw and his people can pull it off in March 2008, when IDC publishes its annual review of worldwide external storage sales.

Virtualization is the future of IT

The amount of digital information is exploding, as is demand for storage. "The storage market grew by 8% in 2006," Monshaw says. There are more emails in enterprise servers. Each day more video clips and Office files are stored. Each application and each server create more information.

There are more than 20,000 governmental regulations and by-laws requiring IT managers to save more information for longer periods of time, he claims. The default position of the IT management is to save everything, and to duplicate information to external systems for the sake of retrieval after disaster.

How can the systems managers cope with the mushrooming amount of information, and demands for processing? The future of storage, and of the entire IT industry, lies in virtualization and consolidation technologies, Monshaw preaches.

Virtualization provides a giant opportunity to consolidate all storage solutions, he explains. Place all the data in a single virtual database, so all the enterprise's data would be available from a single system.

Decades ago, the mainframe served this purpose. Then computer power became diversified into lots of littler servers. Now it's all coming together again, into a single machine, Monshaw observes.

The leading solution in the virtualization market is VMware's. It can connect dozens of servers in an Intel environment, enabling access to any file from anywhere.

VMware is a subsidiary of That Company, EMC, and if you press Monshaw, he'll say that the stampede of IT managers for its virtualization platform is just the beginning.

"There will be three main players in virtualization," he predicts: Xen, VMware and Microsoft. Vmware's technology is important, he says, but it's not a given that it will win. Microsoft is a giant company that could have surprises up its sleeve, and never dismiss the open-sourcers and the tremendous effort poured into Xen. "We at IBM very much support Xen," he adds.

» posted by ITworld staff

TheMarker.com

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