IBM made an omnibus storage announcement last week - the type of announcement that only IBM can make - of having spent $2 billion on storage in the past two years.

The announcement, which included information about its acquisitions of storage companies XIV, Diligent and FilesX, recapped information already posted on IBM’s site or introduced in storage announcements the company made in EMEA a couple of weeks ago.

The company pointed to a broken link on its site that detailed the 30 announcement it made, but took time to introduce (again) 12 of the announcements in its press release. 

The 12 announcements are:

* XIV – IBM acquired XIV earlier this year and announced XIV’s clustered storage system in August in EMEA.
* DS5000 – IBM’s newest mid-range storage array, which the company also announced in August in EMEA.
* Scale Out File Services – These services that use IBM’s GPFS have been around for a while. I don’t know what’s new about them.
* Diligent – IBM picked up Diligent in April 2007 and says that recently it has enhanced Diligent’s ProtecTier architecture – it didn’t say how.
* Arsenal Digital – IBM acquired Arsenal in January 2007. I talked to a user that has Arsenal’s online backup capability. They said that besides the fact that the billing now comes from IBM rather than Arsenal, they have not seen any changes to their level of backup capability.
* TS3500 Tape Library – IBM introduced this tape library, which uses LTO-4 technology, in 2007.
* DS8000 – Codenamed Shark – this from my understanding is the only ‘new’ announcement. The company added RAID 6 support, which is already included with the DS4700 mid-range array.
* DR550 – IBM is increasing the storage capacity of this archival system, which is something it should be doing as disk drives are growing larger.
* TS1130 tape drive – IBM introduced this drive in July 2008.
* Key Manager – IBM introduced the Key Manager product this year -- I don’t remember when.
* Remote Management Infrastructure Services (RMIS) were introduced in 2007.

If you have a chance to ask IBM what’s new in all of this, please do. I can’t figure it out.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.