EMC's Clariion AX4 tackles growing SMB storage needs
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As small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) save more data and rely on it more, they are turning to networked storage even under the burden of limited budgets and IT expertise.Regulatory requirements, more sophisticated applications and reliance on Web-based supply chains all are forcing small businesses to collect and store more information, according to IDC analyst Rick Villars. They may not have enough data to fill an enterprise-class storage system today, but they want systems that let them add more capacity as they grow, he said.EMC is aiming at this growing market with its Clariion AX4, a platform that can scale from a few terabytes of storage to 60TB and take advantage of many advanced EMC storage management applications designed for large enterprises. The company was set to announce and ship it Tuesday.Swervepoint, a provider of promotional gifts in Middleton, Mass., has less than 1TB of data between its two locations but wants to be able to add storage capacity without buying new servers.&quot;We should buy our servers for the server qualities and buy storage for our server needs,&quot; said Kevin Phoenix, principal in charge of operations and administration.The 15-employee company&#39;s main concerns about networked storage are cost and complexity, and the AX4 eased those worries, Phoenix said. Swervepoint, which counts EMC as one of its own clients, has been a beta tester of the AX4 and purchased a unit. It came with management software that was easy to use, said Phoenix, who said he handles IT for the company but is not an IT specialist.The AX4 comes with at least 3TB of storage and can be expanded by stringing together as many as five systems with 12 drives each. Each AX4 can be ordered with either a Fibre Channel or a iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) connection, meeting demand for IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity among SMBs, according to Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC. Smaller companies tend not to have expertise with Fibre Channel, which is typically used in large enterprises, he said. On the AX4, there is no price difference between the two interface options.The systems will come with 750GB drives at first, but 1TB drives will be available starting in March, opening the door to the AX4&#39;s top-end storage capacity of 60TB, Ader said. Within the full AX4 system and even within each enclosure, users can mix and match SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives. Companies can use management tools including snapshot, failover, business continuity and Microsoft Exchange replication capability with the AX4.By mixing SAS and SATA drives, users can set up a tiered storage system in which the more critical data is on better-performing, more expensive SAS drives and less critical on lower-performance SATA disks, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. Support for enterprise-class software is another benefit of the AX4, which goes up against SMB storage products from competitors including Network Appliance and Equalogic, King said. In particular, its support for virtualization software from EMC&#39;s VMware subsidiary appears to be stronger than in competing products, King said.
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Tosses LifeLine to Intel, Iomega EMC is hoping to woo OEMs with a new piece of centralized file management software aimed at small and medium sized businesses and even home users itching to craft a NAS (network attached storage) setup.â¦
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It's pretty clear which one is wearing the trousers EMC and Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) have expanded and extended their 10 year old strategic alliance. The two will work together on advanced data centre architectures, while FSC will also provide services for the EMC midrange storage that it sells in Europe.â¦
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Are cheap Fibre Channel bundles just in time - or too little, too late? As iSCSI gains traction in the market, cheaper Fibre Channel is back on the agenda this week, with both EMC and Fujitsu-Siemens picking up 4Gig SAN-in-a-box packages assembled by Emulex and Brocade. Could this be the long-awaited low-end breakthrough for Fibre Channel?â¦
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Cisco Systems Inc. , the leading maker of data networking gear, is going into the data-storage business, with a major assist from storage vendor EMC Corp. of Hopkinton.
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There was a time when EMC was considered a rather staid tech company in a boring, if profitable market: storage. No longer. With regulations bearing down on enterprises, EMC is now a major player in areas such as security and content management.
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Courts SMBs with bigger array EMC is reinvigorating efforts to win the hearts and wallets of SMBs with a new storage area network (SAN) array.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems's Linksys division thinks SMBs should have some of the same features enterprises get, such as backup power and virtualization, when they attach storage to their networks. On Monday, the company rolled out its first NAS products for businesses, filling a need it found in smaller organizations when it started investigating the technology about two years ago, said Ivor Diedricks, a senior product marketing manager. The rollout includes two lines of NAS chassis, ranging in price from $999.99 to $2,499.99. NAS is common in enterprises and a fledgling category in consumer electronics, but neither of those types of gear suits enterprises with between five and 100 users, Diedricks said. The company's goal was to key capabilities of the large-enterprise systems into products that are affordable to SMBs. Linksys' well-known parent also serves some enterprises in that five-to-100-user range, Diedricks said. But those companies generally have an in-house IT staff and want a direct support relationship with Cisco, whereas Linksys customers generally turn to resellers for management and support. The NAS products are available with an optional redundant power supply unit to keep the NAS units running in case of a power outage as well as standard on-disk encryption, a system within the chassis for encrypting data. With on-disk encryption, disks can be taken out and moved, and the data will stay secure, Diedricks said. Linksys introduced four NSS (Network Storage System) chassis, each with four drive bays. The NSS6000 includes some advanced features that are not in the NSS4000, notably virtualization capability, Diedricks said. This feature lets a business organize more than one NAS chassis into a single virtual volume. An NSS4000 can be part of one of these virtual volumes, but the NSS6000 is required to run virtualization. Also, the NSS6000 can handle 75 simultaneous users, while the NSS4000 is limited to 15. Both the NSS4000 and NSS6000 also are available in versions that already include a set of 250GB RAID drives for a total capacity of 1TB. Also Monday, Linksys introduced its first stackable switches for SMBs. The devices are designed to help enterprises expand their networks as they grow. As many as eight can be stacked together and managed as one switch, and an optional redundant power supply can keep a stack of as many as six running in case of an outage. The switches range from a 24-port 10/100M bps device with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and two interfaces for fiber Gigabit links to an all-Gigabit Ethernet switch with four fiber interfaces and Power over Ethernet to run VoIP phones and other devices. They all have quality-of-service features to support VoIP. Estimated street prices range from $409.99 to $999.99.
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives...
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Storage networking via iSCSI gets a data transfer boost from the addition of InfiniBand high-speed communication technlogy.
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Storage Expo Iomega punts a hard disk autoloader
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Despite the buzz over the public offering of its VMware software business, EMC Corp. of Hopkinton isn't forgetting its roots as a maker of data storage systems. The company will today unveil major upgrades to its key storage products.
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Storage Expo WORM and a spec for LTO-4 due this year
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Fujitsu Siemens readies storage area network bundle for small businesses.
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4.8TB in one array - but are these drives getting too big? IP-based storage is thoroughly enterprise-ready, claimed iSCSI specialist EqualLogic as it doubled the capacity of its high-end SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) storage box with almost no change in price.â¦
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Celerra, Centera, Clariion and Symmetrix lines get juiced EMC is expected to announce a high-end Symmetrix storage system Monday, in addition to a slew of upgrades for its existing storage gear.â¦
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Announces raft of new products Comment EMC has announced several new products targeted at mid-market enterprises seeking to more effectively consolidate, backup, archive, and protect their information.â¦