0.062: r.i.p. dear ds6000 - forgotten, but not alone
On January 11th 2008, with no fanfare, comment or replacement, IBM's ill-fated "enterprise-class storage in a small, scalable package" slipped silently into the Big Blue Storage Graveyard, with the final removal of all extended service agreements from the pricebook.
I guess this one slipped unnoticed out of Ringmaster TonyP's circus tent (to join the missing elephant, I'm sure). At least, he seems not to be shedding any tears.
When introduced (along with the DS8000) back in 2004, the DS6000 was touted as living proof of the flexibility and agility of the software that attempted to turn an RS6000 cluster into enterprise-class storage. Just over 3 years later and half of that announcement has already been end-of-lifed.
Go figure.
"These are the most significant storage announcements we have made in more than a decade. IBM is focused on being the storage innovator and clear technology leader," said Dan Colby, General Manager, IBM Storage Systems. "Today, we are delivering new economics and choice by leveraging common components, breakthrough technologies from mainframes and supercomputers, and unmatched virtualization and management capabilities."
IBM Press Release: IBM Delivers New Storage Economics and Choice
October 12, 2004
By all accounts of the day, the DS6000 was clearly intended to be a DMX-800 killer - a lofty ambition that seems not to have been able to meet the demands of the market (meanwhile, the DMX-4 950 thrives on).
doesn't seem to be working like the plan
Scanning through the hype and hyperbole of that self-claimed breakthrough announcement, I was reminded of the numerous promises made back then for the DS8000 that have still not seen the light of day, including:
- Running SVC or a "NAS head" in an LPAR
- 75/25 LPARs and/or LPARs as small as 10% (still supports only 50/50 LPARs)
- Infinite linear scalability that will allow the DS8000 to grow to more than 1PB of storage
Heck, you still can't even configure LPARs without rebooting the whole array.
And that's not to mention things like Thin Provisioning, RAID6, SATA drives and 4GB back-ends that are now de-facto requirements in the enterprise space. 3 years is an eternity in this market, and from where we stand today EMC has lapped the DS8000 twice now, with new products in 2005 (DMX3) and 2007(DMX4), leaving IBM selling "N-2" technology as a significant majority of their ESS and early-adopter DS8000 customer base is coming off of their leases.
At the time, IBM also claimed that some 97% of the DS6000 code was the same as in the DS8000. That has to make you wonder if the DS6000's demise was caused by something genetic.
C'est la vie...
technorati tags: 
BarryB, IBM didn't withdraw the DS6000. It is still alive and well. We still happily sell it, market it, support it.
The Announcement letter that this blog is pointing to, back in October 23, 2007, is simply announcing the withdrawal in IBM Europe of some ordering codes (1725 types) that were used to upgrade the DS6000 warranty from 1 year to 2, 3, and 4 years of warranty. We still sell the DS6000 models in Europe and the rest of the world. We just found that in Europe we had better ways to order and supply extended service options so we withdrew the Extended warranty type-models and features. The DS6800 is still there, just with a different way of ordering extended warranties.
Now, I think it would have been nice if the Announcement letter had made it clear what this was all about. However, we had a lot going on that week, one of IBM's biggest announcement days ever, and it slipped under the radar as no one thought the withdrawal of these models was a big deal.
Hope that clears things up.
--- Tony
Posted by: Tony Pearson(IBM) | February 01, 2008 at 10:09 AM
Ooops!
I've been asserting (here on my blog) that the DS6000 has been dead for more than 6 months, and tho' you've been quick to reassure that the Dino-Shark8000 Ain't Dead Yet, this is the first time you've felt the urge to correct me about the DeadShark6000.
How many engineers are left working on that '6K these days? We heard most got cut in a layoff last summer...
Maybe I should shorten the title to just "ds6000 - forgotten."
Posted by: the storage anarchist | February 02, 2008 at 08:01 AM