Jai Menon, IBM Fellow and the company's vice president and chief technologist for software and storage, said the company planned in the next three to five years to deliver storage products with the next generation of virtualisation technology. Under this technology, he said storage products would come with more high-end systems, have specific platforms, use single interfaces, and be more powerful and secure.

The company will also incorporate an ability to allow storage systems to visualise a heterogeneous storage environment to bring the vision of "on demand" infrastructure to reality.

Charles Kiang, vice president of system storage at IBM Asia-Pacific, said virtualisation was today a hot topic and a new milestone in technology driving business benefit.

IBM has been selling virtualisation systems and will continue to develop them to help business and customers transfer the advantage of information access, any time and anywhere, into reliable business benefits fuelling growth.

Kevin Leahy, director of virtualisation strategy and marketing systems at IBM, said business would deploy storage systems with virtualisation infrastructure as it helped reduce operating costs, data migration, increase resource utilisation, while offering more flexibility and business resilience in business infrastructure.

"Customers can use hardware, software and more applications supporting virtualisation to change infrastructure for value, and facilitate application performance," said Leahy.

He said storage virtualisation would eliminate administration tasks like data placement and storage area network zones and allow for more intelligent power management, as it provides a single pool of storage and a single point of management.

Leahy added that the value of virtualisation infrastructure improved the total cost of ownership, which will decrease management costs, increase asset utilisation, and link infrastructure performance to business goals. It also allows system access through shared infrastructure, which leverages common tools and increases flexibility.

To drive IBM's storage products in the global market, the company has developed a strategy to develop and sell storage systems to support infrastructure simplification, business continuity and infrastructure, hoping to help customers reduce cost and complexity.

IBM has 14 development labs worldwide, with US$500 million (Bt18.5 billion) of investment for research and development. It held around 286 patents related to storage technology in 2005.

Jirapan Boonoon

The Nation

HONG KONG