IBM's device to rake in more moolah for SMEs

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) could find their cost of doing business reducing with IBM's recent launch of enhanced storage devices. They could now end up spending less on their IT infrastructure "" both in terms of product cost and maintenance.

IBM recently launched upgraded versions of its storage devices DS8000 and N series. Cost efficiency comes in the form of a single control point, that helps track and confirm the completion of replication operations to avoid costly mistakes.

The DS8000 Turbo line also includes a 25 per cent lower base system list price than previous comparable systems.

"We're turbo charging our storage systems and accelerating our relationship with NetApp relationship to help customers manage their information on demand needs," said Shailesh Agarwal, country manager (storage), IBM India.

A recent study by AMI Partners states the SME sector constitutes approximately 95 per cent of the total industrial units in the country and is a substantial contributor to the GDP. Small enterprises constitute approximately 99.4 per cent of the total SME sector.

At present, Indian SMEs provide employment to over 21 million people and more than one-third of the enterprises would have recruited an additional 3.4 million personnel by end-2005.

"SMEs in India will invest close to $500 million on servers and networking hardware this year, with two-thirds of the spending going toward network-related hardware purchases alone. SMEs see investments in servers and connectivity as critical in the tough Indian market; and only 14 per cent of PC-owning SMEs currently deploy a local area network. This points to a significant untapped connectivity opportunity among SMEs," Agarwal said.

The study by AMI Partners also reveals that data storage spending is set to grow more than 20 per cent in each of three different categories of storage "" hardware, software and services.

The SME environment continues to be driven by a high level of spending from PC and server-attached storage contributing to more than half of the storage hardware spending in 2006.

The enhanced version on the DS8000series, called DS8000 Turbo, has a maximum storage capacity of 320 terabytes - the equivalent of 480,000 CDs.

The Turbo is the same size as its predecessor, but it stores 70 per cent more information and retrieves data 15 per cent faster, said Alistair Symon, the program manager for the new systems.

The DS8000 line boosted IBM's marketshare versus competitor EMC. IBM gained 5.8 per cent in the high-end disk market in 2005 but was still 14 points behind EMC, he said. The new and faster Turbo is expected to make it more competitive.