Gateway Keys Storage Push at Comdex

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Looking for elbow room in the crowded enterprise storage market, Gateway used the annual Comdex show in Las Vegas Tuesday as its soapbox to launch a slew of new storage products.

The Poway, Calif.-based company, which held a consumer electronics-oriented media event last week in New York City in which it alluded to the major enterprise storage push, unveiled two new storage devices, systems management software, and partnerships with both Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and SUSE LINUX.

Gateway will have its work cut out if it wants to compete with IBM , HP , and EMC . While pumping out products similar to what rival vendors manufactured a few years ago, Gateway has been unveiling new devices at a prodigious clip, and seems confident in its ability to undercut competitors by offering low prices.

The outfit, which is also in the midst of a large consumer electronics push with plasma TVs as the main attraction, unveiled the Gateway 860 network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, the first new NAS product from Gateway in more than two years.

It is a Serial ATA-based rackmount device designed to run on Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003, plugs straight into an Ethernet network, and can hold up to 1TB of data. The 860 NAS serves as a virtual “shared drive” for all network users and is targeted at small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), government agencies, and educational institutions

Accompanying the NAS machine is the Gateway 840 SATA Enclosure, a 2U rackmount appliance that attaches directly to servers. Like the NAS 860, it is based
on Serial ATA (SATA) technology, making it less expensive than SCSI-based drives. Serial ATA is exploding as a popular alternative to parallel data connection transfer, and some vendors, such as Gateway, are positioning it as a less-costly alternative to other transfer technologies.

In other product news, Gateway launched its latest systems management software, Gateway System Manager (GSM) 3.0, which gives IT administrators a tool to manage systems from afar with the Web. Mirroring systems management software from IBM, HP, and CA , Gateway’s GSM informs administrators about predictive system failures and provides logs and reports of system changes and problems.

In fact, GSM is standards-based and compatible with all major enterprise consoles, including IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol, and HP OpenView. Dell launched its systems management software offering bolstered by Microsoft’s support
last week.

As previously reported, Gateway has also embarked on a partnership with Hitachi Data Systems, marking the company’s entrance into the enterprise storage area network (SAN) arena. Gateway will sell Hitachi’s Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage systems and software to SMB, corporate, education, and government accounts in the U.S. and Canada.

Lastly, Gateway Tuesday vowed to sell and support SUSE LINUX across its entire line of servers in another example of how Linux is gaining widespread acceptance in the enterprise market as an alternative to Microsoft Windows operating system environments.

SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 8 is now offered with Gateway’s 955, 975, and 995 rackmount servers and its Gateway 960 and 980 tower servers for high-performance computing, while SUSE Standard Server 8 is geared for the “edge” of the network and is now offered with Gateway’s 920, 955, 960, 975,
and 980 servers for file/print, web serving, mail, cache, and firewall deployments.

As far as pricing for the new products, the NAS 860 begins at $3,199 for the 320GB model and comes with four 80GB Serial ATA drives, while the 840 SATA Enclosure begins at a base price of $3,949 for the 320GB model and $7,199 for the 3TB version, and comes standard with three Serial ATA drives. Both devices will begin shipping in mid-December, as will the Gateway Systems Manager 3.0, which will be free with every Gateway server and managed storage product.

Story courtesy of 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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