EMC Takes Unified Storage Down a Notch

Enterprise Storage Forum content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

EMC (NYSE: EMC) has lowered the entry point for its wildly popular Celerra unified storage offerings.

The new Celerra NX4 starts at $20,300, about $12,000 less than the fast-growing NS20. Users sacrifice a little performance and scalability for that price, but it also broadens the market for one of EMC’s most popular products.

Brad Bunce, EMC’s director of Celerra product marketing, said the ability to manage multiple protocols — CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel — from a single box is “very attractive, especially in the SMB space.

“It’s clearly going to resonate in the SMB space,” he added.

The NX4 is built on the Clariion AX4, rather than the higher-end Clariion CX that the NS20 is based on. That allows the NX4 to mix SASand SATAdrives, but not high-performance Fibre Channel drives.

The new offering doesn’t quite get EMC down into the $10,000 to $15,000 price point that would attract smaller businesses, which leaves room for competitors like NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), although EMC has its Iomega NAS line at the very low end.

But for users willing to pay the $20,000 entry fee, the NX4 offers plenty of performance and features: high availability, 4TB of storage with scalability to 60TB (the NS20 now reaches 90TB), management tools, thin provisioning and snapshots, and a 4Gbps Fibre Channel option — and EMC claims it can be up and running in 15 minutes.

The Celerra NX4 supports Microsoft, Unix, Linux and VMware (NYSE: VMW) ESX Server operating environments, and Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

Back to Enterprise Storage Forum

Paul Shread
Paul Shread
eSecurity Editor Paul Shread has covered nearly every aspect of enterprise technology in his 20+ years in IT journalism, including an award-winning series on software-defined data centers. He wrote a column on small business technology for Time.com, and covered financial markets for 10 years, from the dot-com boom and bust to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. He holds a market analyst certification.

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Cloud Insider for top news, trends, and analysis.

Latest Articles

15 Software Defined Storage Best Practices

Software Defined Storage (SDS) enables the use of commodity storage hardware. Learn 15 best practices for SDS implementation.

What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) is the encapsulation and transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) frames over enhanced Ethernet networks, combining the advantages of Ethernet...

9 Types of Computer Memory Defined (With Use Cases)

Computer memory is a term for all of the types of data storage technology that a computer may use. Learn more about the X types of computer memory.