At PC Expo in New York, IBM said that by the beginning of next year all of its servers will support Fibre Channel SANs, which link storage devices and servers over a high-speed network. By September, IBM's storage division is also expected to ship a storage system that simultaneously supports mainframe, Unix, and Windows NT data-a capability currently provided by Compaq, EMC , and Hitachi Data Systems.

IBM says the growth of electronic business is driving the need for more flexible storage environments. "Handling information is the currency of E-business, and a storage area network will be the bank," says Walter Raizner, VP of marketing and strategy for IBM's Technology Group.

IBM is also introducing software to centrally manage SAN infrastructures. The software combines its Tivoli Enterprise systems-management suite and Tivoli Storage Management, a repackaged version of IBM's Adstar Distributed Storage Management software. Initially, the software will let servers from multiple vendors back up data to a single IBM tape library over SANs. By next year, customers will be able to back up data directly from hard disks, bypassing servers, to tape libraries from different vendors over SANs.

Sean Derrington, a senior analyst with the Meta Group, says that by tapping into Tivoli's management capabilities and existing partnerships with an array of vendors, IBM is accelerating its ability to support heterogeneous SANs. But Derrington notes that IBM trails companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun in supporting the Fibre Channel high-speed interconnect.

By next year, IBM also plans to offer application management over SANs; logical configuration of drives over SANs, so companies can reallocate storage capacity on the fly; and universal access to a single version of data, regardless of operating system or application. IBM didn't disclose prices for the upcoming offerings.

Quantum is introducing SAN and network-attached storage products-plug-and-play thin storage servers that reside on an existing network. Through its ATL tape library division, Quantum says it will deliver hybrid disk-and-tape storage systems that operate on SANs, but it didn't disclose availability or prices. The Snap Server from its Meridian Data division, a $2,000 network-attached storage device that supports up to 32 Gbytes, is shipping now.