Gateway to Announce Hitachi SAN Pact

With aggressive plans to elbow its way into the high-end storage market, PC maker Gateway has inked an enterprise SAN reseller pact with Hitachi Data Systems .

Gateway is expected to formally announce next week that it plans to resell Hitachi’s SAN product line as part of its push into the enterprise storage
market. The Poway, Calif.-based firm also plans to be “extremely disruptive” in pricing the SAN offerings, according to GM of systems and networking products Scott Weinbrandt.

At an event in New York City where Gateway introduced nine new consumer electronics products, Weinbrandt announced the average unit price of the SAN offering would be “in the range of $50,000,” much less than similar offerings from rival Dell .

Gateway has already adopted Dell’s server model for its enterprise storage push. The plan to offer cut-rate pricing could trigger a drop in prices across the industry.

In an interview with internetnews.com, Weinbrandt said Gateway will make two storage-related announcements at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas next week, including a new ATA “JBOD” (Just a Bunch Of Disks) device that lets enterprise customers store up to two terabytes of data for a fraction of the cost of devices now available on the market.

A low-end storage device, targeting the small-to-midsize business (SMB) market, will retail for $6,000, much less than competing offerings, which go for between $20,000 to $30,000, according to Weinbrandt.

The device will include SCSI software and will ship only in early December.

Gateway also plans to unveil a NAS (network-attached storage) product at next week’s show that will be priced in the range of $3000. Weinbrandt reports the product will offer storage of up to 1.2 terabytes of data and will be marketed with an LCD monitor.

Weinbrandt, a former Dell executive, has been the driving force behind Gateway’s storage strategy, which includes the sale of high-density compact servers.

The company already markets the Gateway 955 1U and the Gateway 975 2U products — compact rack-mount servers running Intel Xeon processors. The boxes can run up to 3.06GHz with a 533MHz front side bus and include dual-integrated Gigabit Ethernet network ports and 64-bit PCI-X technology. The servers also come with Ultra 320 SCSI Hot-Swap 10,000 RPM hard drives and can be clustered for high compute-intensive applications.

Story courtesy of Internet News.

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