IBM is the latest storage giant to step up efforts to woo IT buyers, promising partitioning capabilities cribbed from its mainframe heritage, as well as space-saving formats and better server connectivity.

At last week's Storage Expo in London, IBM led a troop of vendors offering systems to help firms with regulatory compliance and security issues that have pushed data storage and recovery to the top of IT agendas over the past two years.

IBM's announcements come as firms are trying to comply with new corporate governance rules for data archiving and deletion, at the same time that business intelligence and multimedia systems are increasing demands for capacity. Global affairs are also casting a shadow. Storage software giant Veritas last week reported that board involvement in planning for disaster recovery has almost doubled in the past 12 months because of fears over war, terrorism and other threats.

IBM's new TotalStorage DS6000 ultra-dense server is "slightly larger than a VCR", said IBM, but can hold 16 disks, each of up to 300GB. Simon Egan, sales manager at systems integrator Morse, said, "This kit is pretty different. It's a 3U system that fits into a 19in-wide rack and you can just add more of them as you grow. You can connect to a mainframe from the same box."

The big brother to the system is the DS8000 array, based on two or four IBM Power5 chips and offering Virtualisation Engine capabilities to consolidate two data sets in virtual pools. Future upgrades will support the consolidation of more data sets. The system can also connect direct to mainframes and uses a new cacheing technology called ARC to accelerate performance.

"It's designed to shift the customer's financial paradigm via linear scalability and logical partitioning," said Jim Tuckwell, IBM product marketing manager. "You can have two environments, one production and one test or data mining, or Tivoli Storage Manager and a tape offload capability running side by side."

Virtualisation is becoming a key data management technology, according to William Fellowes of analyst firm The 451 Group.

"EMC is doing virtualisation in the network switch, HDS in the array microcode and IBM in server systems. Virtualisation is a done deal for enterprises and storage is the area it's affecting most," Fellowes said.

Other vendors are scurrying to fill storage gaps. At Storage Expo, Microsoft showed its Data Protection Server (DPS) disk backup software in the UK for the first time, promising an open beta for free download early next year. EMC has continued its acquisitions by buying Dantz, in a move that will let it offer an alternative to Veritas for backup in smaller firms. HDS last month renewed storage lines with the TagmaStore initiative; and EMC earlier this month issued software to automate storage management routines.

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