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Will IBM's new "Shark" sink or swim?

IBM will release new top-end "Shark" storage systems Monday that could boost the company's prospects against entrenched competitors in the depressed storage market.

Three years ago, IBM introduced its first Enterprise Storage System product, code-named Shark, in an attempt to rebuild a market it had almost totally ceded to rivals EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.

But Big Blue's timing turned out to be bad. Storage sales for plummeted 19 percent from $16.3 billion in 2000 to $13.3 billion in 2001, according to market research firm Gartner Dataquest, as spending for dot-com expansion and the recession curtailed spending.

This time, however, IBM might do better, partly because the company has fixed some early Shark problems. With the new line, IBM has overhauled the design, improving everything from data transfer capabilities to cache size.

"Shark is due for a refresh. The timing couldn't be better, as far as I'm concerned," said John Webster, a storage analyst at the Data Mobility Group. Companies have been filling up all the extra capacity they bought before, but during the fourth quarter, those companies will "realize they're finally running thin and start acquiring again."

News source: Cnet

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