The company also adamantly rejected speculation that the mid-range box heralds the beginning of the end of its sales of hardware made by Engenio.

The new high-end IBM device is a pumped-up version of the company’s existing Shark array that scales to 192TB and is called the IBM TotalStorage DS8000. As predicted by ComputerWire last week, it introduces a processor virtualization technology that will allow it to host storage applications.

This is really going to change the way storage systems are used, said Diane McAdam, analyst at the Data Mobility Group. Tony Asaro, analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group, said: Over time this is going to have major impact.

The mid-range device, which scales to 67TB, is called the DS6000 and, like the DS8000, will ship later this year. Although the DS60000 runs different processors to the DS8000, it shares 97% of its firmware, so that the two boxes will be able to natively snapshot and mirror data to each other. Currently there are no other mid-range and high-end devices that can communicate with each other like this.

But the significance is more than just that the DS6000 can talk to DS8000. They also share the same management tools, Asora said. Buyers of the DS6000 will be able to move up to a larger DS8000 device when needed, without having to retrain in new software tools.

The DS6000 is also much denser than other storage arrays, and – according to IBM – in a 5TB configuration occupies only 4% of the floor space of an equivalent Clarrion array made by EMC Corp, and is one-tenth the weight, with correspondingly lower power consumption.

It can also be connected to mainframe Z/OS and OS/400 servers via FICON connections not available on other mid-range arrays. Mid-sized mainframe shops have been ignored for a while. But they’re not going away, and if IBM gives them this mid-range alternative they could convert customers quite nicely, said McAdam.

Typical of any launch of new disk hardware, IBM spooled out claims of superior performance to rival hardware. It also stressed a four-year warranty that includes software support for both the DS6000 and DS8000, alongside what it said is reworked and lowered software pricing.

This gives us all the bragging rights. There isn’t anything Hitachi did in September [with the Lighting Tagmastore launch] or EMC has done in the past year that compares, boasted IBM storage division general manager Dan Colby.

The new architecture in the DS8000 is delivered by the logical processor partitioning of its Power5 processors. Originally developed for server use, this will allow the DS8000 to host a range of storage applications such as IBM’s SAN Volume Controller, SAN File System, or disk-to-disk backup software. You’ll be able to backup to tape without going through anything – true server-less backup – or if you run SVC you won’t need a separate appliance to host it, or have any of the in-band issues.

But while IBM freely acknowledged that SVC, SFS or even NAS gateway software could run on the DS8000, it has not decided which of these applications to port to the array.

Porting SVC to the DS8000 would allow it to virtualize or pool its own and third-party disk capacity in the same way as the Lightning Tagmastore launched by Hitachi last month.

Clearly putting SVC or SFS in a partition makes a lot of sense. You could also put a NAS head in there, and get rid of gateway hardware, said Leslie Swanson, IBM storage systems vice president.

But IBM said that at present customers who want to use SVC are happy to run it as currently implemented on a server appliance – sparing them the need to buy a much more expensive high-end box for the job, and answering the competitive threat of the Tagmastore. For the time being the processor partitioning will at least allow the DS8000 to act simultaneously as production and development platforms within separate processor partitions.

The processor partitioning – or processor virtualization – will restrict the resources that each partition can consume, so preventing a storage application affecting the core I/O workload of the array. Hitachi’s Lighting Tagmastore launched last month also runs virtualization software within the array, but McAdam said that without processor partitioning it cannot divide up processor resources in as fine-grained a way as IBM’s device.