At the same time EMC is holding its annual EMC 2011 conference in Las Vegas titled “Cloud Meets Big Data,” IBM made its own move in this space. This week, the veteran tech giant launched a brand new big data storage offering suit.

IBM announced a whole line-up of tape-storage backup, enhanced archiving and deduplication products specifically designed for customers’ big data. The company came up with the original concept of tape-storage in the early 50s, but even though somewhat outdated according to some, this technology still represents a very large market:

“Analysts who track such things generally agree that between 50 and 60 percent of all the world’s businesses that maintain digital records have tape in the mix somewhere.”

IBM’s new storage line-up is directly competing with EMC. But, as Forbes highlighted, this didn’t seem to be a considerable factor when EMC awarded Big Blue’s Watson project one of its 2011 Data Hero Awards in the very same the new storage offerings were launched.

IBM had other launches too lately, primarily as a part of its midmarket strategy. The most recent one is the introduction of Business Process Manager Express, a version of its enterprise BPM software reworked for small to medium businesses. BPM Express has a lower-cost cloud-based version called Blueworks Live, and is fitting in top yet another IBM strategy – an emphasis on cloud services.

IBM is developing its market share in multiple segments, and that includes big data and the cloud as well as virtualization. Not so long ago at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World gathering, the company and Red Hat announced a partnership through which they’ll develop Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KMV) technology-based products.