What's In Store For Enterprise Market?

Iomega is entering the enterprise NAS market for the first time, while Snap Appliance is beefing up its upper-midrange NAS line. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has launched a new assault on the market, while EMC unveiled its first stand-alone NAS appliance.

Some solution providers, however, remain baffled and skeptical about the enterprise and upper-midrange NAS space, where it appears that customers are more interested in SANs. One VAR said there has been increasing use of low-cost ATA-based storage arrays, which are easier to manage and cheaper to run than NAS appliances.

>> Vendors roll out NAS appliances, but some solution providers say their customers prefer SANs.

Hope Hayes, president of Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider and Network Appliance partner, said the vendor told her it is doing well in the enterprise space but she has not seen that success.

Clients are choosing SAN over NAS, even when they do not need a SAN, Hayes said. "We visited one of our clients recently, and they said they need a SAN," she said. "We told them they need a NAS. It ended up being a very small NAS deal."

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Another of Alliance's clients recently acquired an EMC Symmetrix SAN array on a lease. In that deal, EMC threw in a Celerra NAS head for the Symmetrix SAN array free of charge, Hayes said. "The client just doesn't need it," she said.

Dan Carson, vice president of marketing and business development at Open Systems Solutions, a Yardley, Pa.-based solution provider, said that while NAS solutions are much easier to install than a SAN, a NAS is tough to back up. "Also, large file transfers over a NAS can bring a network to its knees," Carson said.

"One client has a NAS but is looking to get rid of it," he said. "He has a high-availability SAN and just doesn't want that NAS. He wants to simplify his architecture."

Among the new NAS appliances being rolled out are Snap Server 4500 1U rackmount servers, which are slated to be released this week in 480-Gbyte and 720-Gbyte models with 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processors, as well as a 1-Tbyte model with a 3.06GHz Pentium 4, said Jim Sherhart, product marketing manager at Snap. They include hot-swap hard drives, redundant Gigabit Ethernet ports, integrated eTrust antivirus software from Computer Associates International, snap copy capabilities and support for Active Directory.

The 480-Gbyte and 720-Gbyte versions are slated to ship starting mid-May, while the 1-Tbyte model should ship early next month, he said.

EMC plans to roll out its first stand-alone NAS appliance in the third quarter. Based on Microsoft's Windows Powered NAS operating system, EMC's NetWin 200 will help the company strengthen its position in the midrange storage market, said Chuck Hollis, vice president of platforms marketing at the storage vendor.

EMC currently sells Celerra NAS gateways, which make use of disk space on the vendor's Symmetrix and DMX enterprise-class SAN arrays.

The NetWin 200 initially will be based on a server from Dell Computer, EMC's largest storage partner. Other versions will be built on platforms from Fujitsu and possibly other OEMs, Hollis said.

HDS is trying once more to establish itself as a NAS vendor. Last month, HDS unveiled NAS gateways OEMed from Network Appliance. These gateways do not have any intrinsic storage capacity, but instead allow data stored on HDS arrays to be served to a company's network as if they were stored on a NAS appliance, said Kevin Sampson, director of marketing for HDS' NAS products.

Iomega in mid-April released its first enterprise-class NAS appliances. Scheduled to ship this week, the two models feature dual 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processors running under Microsoft Windows Powered OS 2.01, up to 1.4 Tbytes of space, hot-swappable IDE hard drives, two redundant hot-swappable power supplies, four hot-swappable fans, and one or two Gigabit Ethernet faces, said Wayne Arvidson, director of network storage marketing.