News

Dell Intoduces NAS, SAN Pair

• By Scott Bekker
• 09/05/2000

Dell Computer Corp. introduced the PowerVault 705N NAS Appliance and the PowerVault 530F SAN Appliance this month, expanding their offering of storage and storage management products.

"We’re addressing the enterprise as well as the small to medium-sized business," says Bob McNally, manager of plaform marketing for PowerVault at Dell. Dell is targeting the entry level storage appliance market with the two products. McNally says that although the entry-level market segment has lower revenue, it is still the fasted segment of the market.

McNally says that Dell intends to target customers who have modest storage needs, but may ramp up to larger and larger devices. In addition, the entry-level market may complement Dell’s business PC market.

The 705N NAS appliance crams 120GB into a single 1U rackmount unit. The high storage density offers a particular advantage to administrators who keep storage in collocation facilities and accrue costs based on how much space they use.

Dell suggests that ease of use may be a deciding factor for administrators choosing the NAS. They say that mounting the unit is as simple as connecting the unit via standard Ethernet and turning the unit on.

The 530F SAN appliance functions as a gateway server between a TCP/IP network and a Fibre Channel network. Dell says that the SAN appliance is preconfigured and also offers similar ease of installation.

However, like most Fibre Channel projects, Dell suggests that an implementation is not a "do it yerself" project, offering complementary support services for the project.

Contact Dell, www.dell.com.