Gateway Eyes Dell’s Server Model for Storage

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Gateway Tuesday will unveil new rack storage systems and a tape drive to remind enterprise customers that despite its rejiggered focus on consumer electronics, the company still cares for their businesses.

The Poway, Calif.-based company, yearning to move out from under the shadow of a sluggish PC market and to gain better footing in the home entertainment
sector, is sticking to its corporate customer guns with its new 850 SCSI JBOD system and 820 Linear Tape Open (LTO) Autoloader — its first foray into storage subsystems.

The Gateway 850 and Gateway 820 rack systems are both 2U in size and compatible with standard racks. The vendor hopes they will be the backbone for network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) products in its systems and networking portfolios.

Both products are designed to help small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and organizations store and retrieve information. While several rivals such
as IBM , HP , and Dell offer similar products for storage networks, plying the market with competing products from a less established storage provider may seem ill-advised.

But Gateway is seizing on the oft-relayed detail from storage analysts that corporate data doubles every six months. Company officials are clinging to
the notion that IT managers are “drowning under a flood of bits and bytes” and therefore need more help — at an attractive price point.

To this end, Gateway claims to be taking a page out of Dell’s own book for selling servers by undercutting the price of competitors. This is just one strategy the company is taking as it attempts to transform itself from a traditional PC maker to a “branded integrator of technology solutions.”

Gateway will launch an array of branded products across a host of new categories throughout the rest of the year and will customize those products for
its consumer and business customers. Just yesterday, the company unveiled the Gateway 960X, a mid-range server designed for small- and mid-sized enterprises as well as workgroups within larger organizations.

“We want to be disruptive to Dell in storage — Dell gets 60 points for margins,” says Scott Weinbrandt, general manager of the Systems and Networking Products Group at Gateway. “There’s no way they should be getting away with that. We want to do for storage what Dell did for servers.”

Enterprise Storage Group Senior Analyst Nancy Marrone-Hurley believes in order for Gateway to truly compete on the high end they will also need to market a NAS offering and infrastructure components to create a SAN.

However, Marrone-Hurley says Gateway will now be able to sell storage as part of a low cost bundle with its PCs, which should help them be more competitive with Dell in the entry-level storage market.

“The caveat is that every storage vendor has already seen the margins in storage eroding, so they are moving toward adding more value to the solution with management software and storage services (remote replication, snaps, ILM),” she continues. “Being the lowest cost isn’t always going to win these days, value-added services and management solutions that lower the TCO for the storage environment is what many consumers will be looking for (at least on the ‘high end’).”

Tim Diefenthaler, director of enterprise storage at Gateway, told internetnews.com customers could expect such features as snap shots and remote replications in the future as the company looks to position itself better against its rivals, who offer high-end systems to accompany SANs.

As for more specific features, the 850 SCSI JBOD, which stands for “just a bunch of disks,” features a host of storage, reliability, and expansion capabilities.

Gateway envisions that customers who are already deploying the Gateway 955, 975, and 995 servers will use the Gateway 850 as a vessel for spillover storage or as a component in a SAN or NAS supporting e-mail, database, CRM, and ERP applications.

The Gateway 850 features as many as 12 hot-swappable Ultra 320 SCSI hard drives, supporting up to 1.7 Terabytes of data. The machine can transfer data via single or split SCSI backplanes in single- or dual-bus mode using LSI Ultra 320 SCSI controllers.

By way of comparison, Diefenthaler said a similarly configured Dell system would cost some $4,000 more than a loaded 850 system.

The Gateway 820 LTO Autoloader is geared for SMBs, institutions, and enterprises that desire a low-cost tape backup product that works at high capacity. The Autoloader features an LTO-1 Ultrium tape drive with capacity for 100 GB of uncompressed data and performance of 57.6 GB/Hr uncompressed.

The autoloader also features an eight-cartridge carousel holding LTO tape with a maximum data capacity of 800GB uncompressed. A SCSI interface allows customers to connect to Gateways 955, 975, or 995 servers.

Starting at $2,999, the Gateway 850 will soon support fail-over clustering with Microsoft’s Cluster Server. The Gateway 820 Autoloader is priced at
$5,799.

This story originally appeared on Internet News.

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Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton
Clint Boulton is an Enterprise Storage Forum contributor and a senior writer for CIO.com covering IT leadership, the CIO role, and digital transformation.

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