Driven by a rapidly growing pool of sensors and gadgets that are digitizing information, worldwide data already vastly exceeds available storage space -- yet enterprise demand for storage capacity is expected to have grown at a compound annual growth rate of over 43% between 2008 and 2013.

IBM's will now include IBM's System Storage Easy Tier feature, which uses performance monitoring software or data tiering technolog to move only the most active data to faster solid-state drives (SSDs).

The new function can eliminate the need for manual storage tier policies and reduce costs by eliminating the number of high-end Fibre Channel or SAS drives that are often short stroked in order to increase performance.

Short stroking involves setting up multiple hard drives so that only the outer sectors of the drive platters are accessed by the read/write head, which speeds data throughput but wastes the vast majority of the unit's capacity. A single SSD, can produce up to 16,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). In comparison, a high-end, 15,000rpm Fibre Channel drive maxes out at 200 IOPS.

also introduced a new tape library device for storing unstructured long-term retention data. IBM's new Long Term File System uses the recently released LTO Ultrium Generation 5 tape drive, offering up to 1.5TB of storage capacity or 3TB with compression -- double the capacity of LTO-4 tape drives.