Dell, NetApp to roll out competing storage devices
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"Dell and Network Appliance, former allies in the market for special-purpose storage devices, will introduce competing products Monday...
...At the same time, Network Appliance, the leading seller of NAS products, will introduce new mid-range and low-end products and all but phase out models based on Compaq's Alpha chip in favor of the less-expensive Intel Pentium III...
"The NetApp machine, the F820, is a lower-end sibling to the F840 that replaces NetApp's F760, said Chris Bennett, director of hardware products at NetApp. Where the F840 can store as much as 6 terabytes of data, or 12 when paired in a cluster of two machines, the F820 can hold 3 terabytes or 6 in the clustered configuration.
Although Dell is a competitor, NetApp is aimed mostly at taking market share from EMC, which sells more expensive storage systems, Bennett said.
A F840 with 2 terabytes of space, a typical configuration, costs about $212,000, NetApp said. The company also introduced a new low-end product, the F85, designed for branch offices of large corporations and costing about $17,400 for a typical configuration with 216GB of capacity.
NetApp also introduced a caching server with 486GB capacity that helps customers distribute data stored on a central server to "caches" of information scattered across the Internet.
A typical C3100 caching server, the company's new mid-range product, costs about $40,000, the company said.
NetApp is following its "center-to-edge" strategy--selling the central data storage devices as well as the remote caching systems and the software used to manage the whole network. The strategy has been key to winning new customers, executives said during a financial conference call Thursday. "
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