Storage Vendors Fill Midrange Gap

All of the key storage-system vendors have stepped up their emphasis on midrange solutions with significant refreshes of their product lines.

EMC and Hewlett-Packard, the industry's two largest storage-systems vendors, have released major upgrades to their midrange offerings. In addition, IBM and Hitachi Data Systems have released storage systems targeted at midsize organizations.

EMC's new CLARiiON line has three models: the CX300-s, CX500-s and CX700-s. All support Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity. But, more important, they take advantage of EMC's new UltraPoint hardware and software, which offers point-to-point connectivity to individual disk drives with a diagnostic capability. EMC says that ensures higher levels of reliability and availability.

"It enables midtier storage devices to scale much better and more reliably than they could in the past," says David Donatelli, EMC's executive vice president of storage platforms. UltraPoint will make it easier for partners to sell low-end solutions and allow customers to add larger configurations or higher-density drives down the road, Donatelli adds.

The new CLARiiON models also offer what EMC calls Virtual LUN technology, which allows customers to seamlessly move data volumes online without impacting an application. As more organizations build tiered storage solutions, the Virtual LUN makes it more practical to move data from Fibre Channel disk to ATA within the array.

Meanwhile, HP's long-awaited upgrade to its Enterprise Virtual Array line has been shipping for several months now in three iterations, the EVA 4000, 6000 and 8000. The line is key to HP's 15 percent third-quarter growth in its storage business.

The new EVA line allows for the immediate use of a clone copy, software that takes advantage of the EVA's virtualization capability for array management and the ability to centrally manage arrays and servers by integrating HP's Storage Essentials with Systems Insight Manager.

The EVA line's key improvement is its upgradability, says Mark Darlington, COO of HP Gold enterprise partner Trilogy Solutions. "It's a very easy upgrade to go from the 4000 to the 6000 because you keep the same controllers, and all you have to do is add some back-end loop switches," Darlington says. "You can start out with a very small EVA 4000 and upgrade it to eight shelves and 112 drives."

Meanwhile, IBM recently filled a hole in its midrange storage portfolio with the release of SAN Starter Kit, a bundled solution consisting of IBM's TotalStorage Switch L10 and the dual-controller DS400 Express disk. The entry-level Fibre Channel solution is suitable for e-mail, shared databases and Web content. IBM also released its DR550 Express, a midarchiving solution that scales from 1 TB to 56 TB.

In addition, IBM released the TotalStorage N3700, the first product resulting from its new OEM relationship with Network Appliance. The NAS supports up to 16 TB of capacity and offers iSCSI SAN connectivity as well.

The two companies last month broadened their pact to collaborate on virtualization, combining the functionality of NetApp's FAS line and V-Series with IBM's storage-virtualization technologies and blade servers.

Also looking to further move virtualization into the midrange, Hitachi Data Systems has launched the TagmaStore Network Storage Controller NSC55. Taking key virtualization functions and microcode from its new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform, the NSC55 manages up to 16 PB of external storage, including midrange systems from EMC, IBM, Hitachi, HP and Sun Microsystems, Hitachi says.