IBM has announced it now has more than 2,000 storage virtualization customers, further extending its lead in the marketplace with the addition of ShopKo. ShopKo has completed implementation of a tiered storage infrastructure based on IBM disk and virtualization technology. The information on demand environment has reduced backup time for major applications by as much as 67 percent and improved overall application response time. The IBM virtualization solution is expected to provide ShopKo with nearly $2 million in additional savings over the next four years. For their project involving the implementation of IBM's SAN Volume Controller virtualization software, ShopKo received the first place award in the category of "Innovation and Promise" at Storage Networking World.