NTAP alliance with dell about to pay off?
Courtesy of the DellAlternative Board:
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>>Dell adds to its network attached storage arsenal
By John McCright, PC Week Online
April 30, 1999 10:12 AM ET
Responding to a groundswell of demand for network attached storage, Dell Computer Corp. next week will roll out an addition to its line of NAS appliances.
The new mid-range and high-end NAS devices, called the PowerVault 700N line, connect directly to a LAN and offer a quick and relatively inexpensive way to add storage capacity.
Such storage appliances, or "filers," are gaining popularity as demands for storage doubles every year. Market research firm International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass., forecasts the NAS market will grow to more than $5 billion in 2003 from about $500
million last year.
Dell's disk-based storage devices, based on technology licensed from NAS market leader Network Appliance Inc., include a "Snapshot" feature that automatically saves copies of file systems in the background so that lost or corrupted files can be quickly restored.
Users can mirror a filer to a remote filer over the WAN for disaster protection, officials said. They also offer RAID capabilities.
The 700N series filers come with a browser-based utility that enables administrators to set up network privileges. Organizations can cluster two 700N series filers for failover.
Unix, NT flexibility
The offerings mark the first time the Round Rock, Texas, company has sold storage devices that offer native processing of non-Windows NT files. The file system in the Dell storage devices supports both Windows and Unix file permissions and security models.
This reduces processing overhead when a user on a Windows client requests data that resides on a Unix server as the filers don't need to perform an extra translation step, officials said.
One large government agency is already using the Dell filers to store page images from a Unix-based server that are accessed by end users running Windows PCs, said Bobbi Hazard, director of storage at Dell.
"We're excited to help customers move their Unix applications over to the NT world, which is perhaps less expensive," Hazard said.
The departmental PowerVault 720N supports 450GB of data and 3,000 users. The top-of-the-line 760N supports 1.4 terabytes of data and 15,000 concurrent users. The line also includes the mid-range 740N filer.
Pricing for the filers, available now, starts at $19,500 for the 720N.
Dell (DELL) also will announce next week that it is extending its services offering, called Dell Technology Consulting, to include storage planning and consolidation. These services are in addition to the Dell service and support provided through Wang Global, NCR Corp.
and Unisys Corp.
Dell is at www.dell.com. |
