EMC Adds Mid-Tier NAS Boxes

EMC has completed development on several new products for the networked-attached storage (NAS) market, adding mid-tier boxes and a few other enhancements to its NAS family.

The Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage systems vendor announced the upgrades Wednesday, less than a week after rival Network Appliance announced similar products to fill out the lower ends of its product lines.

Both EMC and Network Appliance had already offered high-end NAS boxes, but in response to customer demand, each has come to realize the importance of providing solutions for smaller companies that still require scalable file servers.

Tom Joyce, senior director of NAS product marketing at EMC, says the market is changing in that mid-tier companies are clamoring for enterprise-level NAS capabilities.

Joyce told internetnews.com that EMC aims to accommodate the evolution with the Celerra NS600G and NS600GS, new NAS gateways that make it possible for customers to integrate NAS functions into CLARiiON CX600 and CX400 storage systems. By offering both NAS and SAN on the same box, EMC is appealing to a broader range of customers who often have one or the other. The gateway is offered in both single-data mover (NS600G) and dual-data mover (NS600GS) configurations.

Meanwhile, the NS600S is the new entry-level model for the mid-tier Celerra NS600 series that first launched last December. It includes a single data mover but may be upgraded to a dual-data mover configuration online.

“This is high-performance datacenter class stuff,” Joyce said. “Scalability is a hard thing to do no matter how you do it. This joins the first NS600 in
taking war-horse work in tough environments.”

The enhanced Celerra line also boasts new features, including lower cost ATA disk drives in the NS600 systems and Celerra CNS clustered environments.
This means every Celerra model now offers ATA disk drives for new applications such as backup to disk from partners such as CommVault, Computer Associates, Legato, and VERITAS.

Lastly, EMC said the EMC NetWin 200 NAS system is now generally available. NetWin 200 is a combination of the Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system with EMC’s CLARiiON CX200 networked storage platform. It is designed for those customers operating in a Microsoft Windows environment
that require seamless integration of NAS.

“Over the past few months EMC has made a number of strategic announcements that hit directly at where the mid-tier is headed,” says Steve Kenniston, Technology Analyst for the Enterprise Storage Group. “Products such as the new NS600S and NetWin 200 deliver a simple to manage NAS solution at a low entry cost. Additionally, with the NAS and SAN convergence trend, the NS600G helps customers better utilize their existing EMC storage.”

Joyce said that although the mid-tier systems are geared to an attractive price point, customers have been requesting that the company offer high-end
capabilities at the mid-tier, which is essentially what the NS600 line is about. However, the first NS600 retailed for $167,000 for a 1 terabyte
configuration.

The new NAS products are available now with list prices of $97,000 for the NS600G, $63,000 for the NS600GS, and $114,000 for the NS600S (1TB configuration). The 500GB NetWin200 carries an estimated end user price of $32,000. The new NAS boxes include CIFS protocol support, SnapSure software, Web Manager, and a two-year hardware, 90-day software warranty.

Story adapted from Internet News.

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