| | Shark Attacks
[from a piece in IBD 10/16:
On the other side, it’s a big win for Big Blue. IBM’s Shark storage system, also called Enterprise Storage Server, is high-end technology designed to let companies store their most critical data. IBM, EMC and Hitachi have been battling each other for market share for years.
Despite the loss, EMC says it remains Wal-Mart’s top supplier of data storage. It has three times the amount of capacity in place as does IBM, an EMC spokesman said.
IBM has made a charge in storage. It’s invested heavily on storage in the past two years, in some cases developing technology that surpasses EMC’s, some analysts say.
“It’s great to go head to head with EMC and win,” said Linda Sanford, senior vice president and group executive of IBM’s Storage Systems Group. One reason for the win, she says, is that IBM’s storage group has worked closely with its mainframe group to meld their technologies.
EMC agrees. EMC said IBM was able to lower its storage price by leveraging the value of the mainframes.
The systems Wal-Mart replaced were housed primarily at its two main data centers, one of which is located at corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. The other, says Phillips, is a secret site in another state. Each center can back up and support the other, he says.
The U.S. economy is weak, but Wal-Mart “is not hunkering down,” said Jeff Roster, an analyst at market research firm Gartner Inc. “Retailers tend to pull in their horns in challenging times. But Wal-Mart realizes technology will be a key differentiator in retail wars of the future.” |
|
