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For a company that claims it’s “not getting into the hardware business,” Symantec is doing a lot of dabbling in the storage hardware market of late. Today, Huawei Symantec Technologies Co. Ltd. – a joint venture of Telco network infrastructure provider Huawei and Symantec – announced its entry into the North American storage and security markets with two storage appliances and a network gateway aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
The first product making its debut in North America is the Huawei Symantec Oceanspace S2600 SAN. The S2600 supports background initialization of RAID and online expansion for up to 96 disks and 256 hosts and offers both Fibre Chanel and iSCSI connectivity.
It also features remote replication (HyperMirror), power failure protection and disk pre-copy. An 8TB Oceanspace S2600 starts at $8,000.
The second product, the Oceanspace N8300, is a unified storage platform designed for mid-range and high-end storage applications. The N8300 supports NAS, FC SAN, and IP SAN protocols and features and active-active clustered NAS architecture. The system supports up to 16 NAS engines for a maximum capacity of 15PB.
The N8300 includes a built-in Veritas NetBackup Client on the NAS engines and supports snapshots, synchronous mirroring and dynamic storage tiering.
The Huawei Symantec Oceanspace N8300 carries a starting price of $50,000 for a 24TB configuration.
Lastly, Huawei Symantec is shipping the Secospace USG2000 BSR/HSR is an all-in-one multi-service gateway that integrates security, routing and switching, wireless access, and voice service functions. Pricing for the Secospace USG2000 starts at $500.
Huawei Symantec has been quietly building its infrastructure and product line overseas. Headquartered in Chengdu, China, Huawei Symantec now boasts more than 4,000 employees, 55 percent of whom specialize in research and development.
The Huawei Symantec joint venture was launched in 2008 and, since that time, the business model has been a focus on the SMB storage and security markets outside of the U.S., beginning in China and expanding to the Asia-Pacific and European markets.
Jane Li, general manager of North America, Huawei Symantec, said the company’s management team decided to enter the North American market now that U.S. economy is on the rebound.
“We have had tremendous growth over the past couple of years and we are now on track for revenues of $500 million dollars this year. The success of the products has been proven to be repeatable and the recovery of the U.S. economy [makes it a good time] to enter this market segment,” said Li.
Huawei Symantec has struck up a deal with Condre Storage as its product pipeline to North America. Condre Storage, which has a distribution network of 2,500 value-added storage resellers, and will offer Huawei Symantec’s to SMBs and enterprise customers.
The Huawei Symantec product line is the second hardware announcement linked to Symantec in as many months. In September, Symantec unveiled the the NetBackup 5000 Appliance, which is comprised of Symantec’s NetBackup PureDisk deduplication software on a pre-configured, pre-packaged hardware device.
A single NetBackup 5000 node boasts a logical storage capacity of 16TB. Multiple nodes can be clustered for a maximum logical capacity pool of about 96TB with six nodes.
Working with one NetBackup Media Server, a NetBackup 5000 node features backup throughput performance of 1.9TB per hour. With four Media Servers, performance for a single NetBackup 5000 node jumps to 4.3TB per hour.
Each NetBackup 5000 node is packed into a 4U-high chassis with a pair of Intel CPUs, 24GB of DDR2 memory, two dozen 1TB hard disk drives (HDD), a RAID 6 configuration, LSI disk management, four Ethernet ports, redundant power and fan modules, and hot-pluggable disks.
Symantec is positioning the NetBackup 5000 as the answer for several backup deployment scenarios, including remote office, virtual machine (VM), and data center backups. The company claims the appliance’s built-in source side deduplication allows for bandwidth efficient centralized backups of remote offices while reducing dependence on tape and unskilled IT personnel. In virtual environments, NetBackup 5000 offers options including guest or image level backup for both VMware and Hyper-V with the option of recovering single files or entire VMDK images. Lastly, the NetBackup 5000 can be used both as a source and target-side deduplication tool for data center backups allowing for bandwidth and storage efficient backup of core data center servers.
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