Computerwire: IBM Clocks 2,000 SVC Customers

Computerwire: IBM Clocks 2,000 SVC Customers
Tim Stammers
May 5, 2006
IBM Corp has chalked up its 2,000th customer for its SVC storage virtualization controller, and says it is adding four to five new customers per day.
Assuming that IBM is talking about weekdays only, that is equivalent to a run-rate of 1,000 to 1,300 new customers per year, in addition to new SVC sales to existing customers. IBM itself said this week it was a little over a year ago that it announced its 1,000th SVC customer.
The SVC began shipping in 2003, and so enjoyed a head-start over other tier-one storage vendors' virtualization products.
Hitachi Ltd and its OEM customers Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co began shipping the Hitachi TagmaStore disk array late in 2004. The TagmaStore can virtualize Hitachi and third-party arrays attached to it, and last month Hitachi's subsidiary Hitachi Data Systems said that around 40% to 45% of the TagmaStores it has sold - including the cut-down NSC versions - are being used to virtualize "something."
EMC Corp, the third large high-end storage vendor, began selling its Invista virtualization software late last year, and is still not talking about sales numbers.