News
EMC Launches New NAS Initiatives
- By Scott Bekker
- 12/05/2000
Looking to expand their data-storage foothold and provide an
alternative to the competing
Network Appliance
Corp. product line,
EMC today launched
its new NAS initiative with the introduction of two hardware offerings and one
software offering during a live Webcast in New York. The new products are EMC
Celerra with HighRoad Software, EMC CLARiiON IP 4700, and EMC Celerra SE File
Server.
EMC is touting Celerra with HighRoad Software as “uniting
the worlds of NAS and SAN.” EMC Celerra with HighRoad Software combines the
file-sharing capabilities of NAS with the high-performance information delivery
of a SAN. It brings file sharing to the SAN environment, as the software can
route files and data traffic directly from the SAN to the user without the
intervention of a NAS server.
“The data is delivered through a SAN rather than a NAS,” Jim
Rothnie, senior vice-president and CTO, said during the presentation. “We’re
bringing file sharing to SANs and revolutionizing how file sharing is
accomplished.”
Code-named ‘Chameleon,” CLARiiON IP4700 is targeted towards
the mid-tier NAS market, giving EMC a presence in an area in which they did not
have one before. A NAS file server that connects to an IP network, CLARiiON
IP4700 combines high availability features with a wide range of network
connections. Just as important, CLARiiON IP4700 is easily deployable, with an
average installation time of 10 minutes.
“We are taking our high-end Celerra product and are bringing
it down to an entry-level high-end storage offering that supports NASs and SANs
together in a single footprint that very economically can address data center
needs,” said EMC COO and president Joe Tucci, while introducing the product.
With the addition of CLARiiON, EMC will now be able to offer
its customers an EMC alternative to compete against the mid-tier NAS offerings
that NetApp has been highly successful in selling lately. Although no price comparisons were made
available, Rothnie said “we [EMC] have created an attractive price performance
that is actually half of the NetApp [Network Appliance] clusters.”
The other hardware offering, Celerra SE, combines the powers
of the Celerra File Server and the Symmetric Enterprise Storage System to
deliver an entry-level NAS configuration. It includes all the high-end
attributes of the Celerra File Server program, can scale to 1.1 terabytes of
internal capacity, and is available in two pre-configured models. – James Martin
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.