IBM invests in Shark storage products

IBM announced it is hiring 1,000 salespeople to sell the company’s newest line of data-storage products. IBM is investing some $400 million in the marketing of the Shark product line in an effort to compete more effectively with rival EMC, the top seller of business storage systems. EMC currently has 27 per cent of the market for separate storage systems that contain multiple hard drives, versus just 11 per cent for IBM.

IBM is betting on its new Shark line of so-called Storage Area Networks

(SANs), groups of linked storage devices containing information for networks of

computers. IBM hopes the Sharks will let it pick up marketshare at the expense

of EMC and others. IBM said it would set up testing centers for customers in

Montpellier, France, and Makuhari, Japan. The market for business storage

devices is booming as companies need vast amounts of data storage capacity to

handle the large volume of information generated by online e-commerce sites.

Storage-system sales is expected to report 55 per cent rise to $46 billion by

2003, according to International Data Corporation.