News

IBM Adds Features to Shark Storage Server

• By Scott Bekker
• 12/14/2000

Today, IBM Corp. is shipping its “Shark” Enterprise Storage Server with additional features to extend its reach into enterprise data centers. The Shark server is IBM’s high end storage server for database storage and backup.

“Flash Copy” makes a second copy of data on the Shark server, while the primary storage system backs up to tape. The feature allows storage to be available at 100% performance, eliminating interruptions during the backup process.

A second enhancement to Shark is the addition of peer-to-peer copying. While data is written to one Shark, a second Shark up to 100km away can act as a slave, making an identical copy on the system. Currently this feature is only available on Sharks using IBM proprietary ESCON storage connection, so NT users will have to wait to use this feature.

Finally, IBM is supporting new operating systems with the Shark server. It will now support Fibre Channel connections to Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Novell Netware servers. IBM began supporting NT and Windows 2000 in July.

Dean Underwood, manager of worldwide marketing for disk subsystems at IBM says that Shark will be the cornerstone of upcoming storage initiatives, particularly the StorageTank software project. “Shark will provide the backend storage for StorageTank,” he says. - Christopher McConnell