ibm beefs up smb storage offerings

IBM beefs up SMB storage offerings
By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld, 08/02/05
IBMTuesday unveiled several storage products that it said will bring iSCSI and enterprise-class functionality -- including WORM (write-once, read many) disk storage -- to the small and midsize business market.
Among the products announced is a network-attached storage (NAS) device that‘s the first fruit of IBM‘s reseller agreement withNetwork Appliance that was announced earlier this year.
IBM‘s new TotalStorage N3700 is a rebranded NetApp FAS270 array that supports file-level data transfers or block-level transfers via the Internet SCSI protocol, which is most widely used to consolidate backing up farms of inexpensive Wintel servers.
"We‘ve seen [that] the SMB market is a fast-growing marketplace. We‘re attempting to bring some enterprise capabilities that we‘ve been developing for some time to that space," said Charlie Andrews, director of IBM‘s TotalStorage Solutions division.
The N3700 comes fully configured with 14 disk drives in either 72G-bytes, 144G-bytes or 300G-bytes disk capacities. It can scale to 16T-bytes.
IBM is pitching the new N3700 as "an economical" NAS solution for businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees that remains versatile enough to be used at large companies with remote-office storage requirements.
IBM is seizing an opportunity in the SMB market and acting quickly by using NetApp technology "to preclude Dell and EMC from getting a leg up" in the iSCSI arena, said Tony Prigmore, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. "NetApp is the clear leader in the iSCSI marketplace. And clearly IBM has always had an excellent collection of SMB channel partners and SMB clients."
IBM also announced the TotalStorage DR550 Express, a disk array suited for compliance-based archival needs because of its ability to create files with WORM capability. The DR550, which uses IBM‘s Tivoli Storage Manager software, scales from 1T-byte to 56T bytes in 1T byte increments, Andrews said.
IBM also announced a storage-area network (SAN) starter kit. The bundled equipment includes an entry-level DS400 Fibre Channel array with up to 12T byte of storage and a 10-port Fibre Channel switch. The bundled SAN starts at $16,376 retail, with half a terabyte of storage capacity. The N3700 starts at $50,000 retail, which comes with 14 72G byte drives for about 1T byte of capacity.
The DR550 starts at $45,000 for 1T byte of capacity.