Features - Storage Innovations:

IBM ENTERS LOW-END OF DATA STORAGE MACHINE MARKET

International Business Machines Corp. may have won its share of the data storage market with its high-end "Shark" machine, but the world's largest computer maker wants to catch small fish, too.

The company, based in Armonk, New York, is launching on Wednesday an entrylevel type of data storage machine that companies can use for e-mail archiving, server consolidation, storage back up, back up to tape, or archiving paper documents, such as legal agreements.

The network-attached storage, which can be accessed by users through a computer network, will start at about $4,420. That's about half the price of IBM's previous entry-level offering in this area and a fraction of the $400,000 sticker price on Shark, which is used for high-performance applications like database management.

Randy Kerns, a senior partner at the Evaluator Group, in Denver, Colorado, said that the storage machines will run the same type of software as the more expensive products, giving it an edge over competitors like Quantum and Maxtor. "It fills out their repertoire of products," Kerns said.

Recently, IBM competitor EMC Corp. also said that it would start pushing into the low end of the data storage market.