"IBM has been delivering virtualization capabilities for more than 40 years and today we unveil a milestone in the area of data storage virtualization with the shipment of 10,000 storage virtualization engines," said Kelly Beavers, IBM's Director of Storage Software, as she announced that IBM has shipped its 10,000th storage virtualization engine - SAN Volume Controller (SVC) - to Able Body Labor, a mid-sized business in Florida.

No other storage company n the world can make such a claim, Beavers noted.

"By working across multiple platforms," she continued, "IBM's storage virtualization helps to lower energy costs and unlocks the proprietary hold that other storage vendors have had on customers for years -- which IBM believes makes storage virtualization the killer application in the storage industry over the next decade."

Able Body Labor will use SVC to be a differentiator in improving their infrastructure, increasing storage utilization, and at the same time helping to lower energy costs.

IBM's storage virtualization, Beavers contends, is helping to unlock the proprietary hold that vendors such as EMC, HP and Hitachi have had on customers for years.

"With IBM SVC, customers can choose any combination of supported EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi or other devices, virtualize them, and manage and deploy them easily and with greater flexibility and independence than ever before," she said.

"Storage virtualization is a huge differentiator for maximizing infrastructures, getting full utilization, and at the same time lowering energy costs," said Paul Zimorski, CIO, Able Body Labor. "Our organization needs to be able to access information very quickly while at the same time truly use the full value of the storage infrastructure we have in place -- and storage virtualization and IBM's SAN Volume Controller solution is going to do that for us."

• Virtualization Update: Citrix Unveils On-Demand Provisioning of Virtual Servers
• Virtualization Update: Adoption Becomes Simpler with IBM's CDAT
• VMware Updates Fusion Virtualization Software for the Mac
• Virtualization Round-Up: Latest Trends, Technologies, and News
• 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo CFP Deadline April 11
• Virtualization Graduated to Being an Everybody's Gotta-Have-One Checkbox Item