Two companies that have gained the most market share from EMC's decline in the last few years, Hitachi and IBM, don't intend to sit idling on the sidelines as EMC improves its products. Both Hitachi and IBM have plans to upgrade their offerings.
Last week, Hitachi announced its 148TB Lightning 9900V systems, which were released last May with 73GB drives but will now be available with 146GB drives. The devices' connectivity has also been upgraded with support for as many as 64 Fibre Channel ports for connecting to storage networks and servers and 32 Fibre Connection (FICON) ports for connecting to mainframes. Hitachi also announced its new Virtual Storage Ports. The ports will let you attach as many as 128 servers to a Fibre Channel port.
IBM is expected to announce an upgrade to its enterprise storage products next month with the release of a minor upgrade to its Enterprise Storage System 800 (also know as Shark) family. On February 17, IBM is also expected to announce that it has licensed LSI Logic's midrange E5600 system, which will ship in March and which IBM will market as the IBM FAStT 900 series.
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