As part of IBM's "Project Big Green" offerings, IBM announced new storage virtualization software that helps clients more efficiently manage and consolidate volumes of business data, providing clients with a storage solution designed to help improve utilization rates, energy efficiency, availability, and scalability of critical applications.

The capabilities of the new IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) 4.3 software can help improve the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures by creating consolidated, virtual pools of information across the enterprise, which enables IT departments to respond to client needs and centrally manage resources. Storage virtualization technology can reduce requirements for additional physical storage hardware systems, which can ultimately reduce overall energy usage in the data center.

Virtualization is one of the five pillars of IBM's Project Big Green offerings, and a key component of IBM's new enterprise data center model, designed to help clients improve IT efficiency and facilitate the rapid deployment of new IT services for future business growth. The new model is based on best practices for virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

IBM remains the leader in storage virtualization with the fastest system tested in the industry. Since its introduction to the market in 2003, IBM has shipped over 12,000 SVC engines running in more than 4,000 SVC systems.

With the volume of data that clients have to store growing, keeping control of storage costs and improving storage utilization is taking on increasing importance in the data center. The improvements in SVC 4.3 can help improve storage utilization even further, which helps reduce energy consumption for a greener data center.

"IBM is dedicated to helping its clients improve their information infrastructures through powerful virtualization technology," said Barry Rudolph, Vice President, Storage Stack Solutions, IBM. "We have been the leader in storage virtualization since SVC was introduced five years ago, and this latest version from IBM further showcases our innovation and represents our commitment to clients to incorporate green, efficient technologies into our storage portfolio to help clients manage the data center crisis of today."

The IBM SVC 4.3 software includes the following enhancements:

• Space-Efficient Virtual Disks
• Space-Efficient FlashCopy
• Virtual Disk Mirroring
• Improved Interoperability