Seagate Debuts Storage Appliances For Small Business

The new storage appliances come at a time when Seagate wants to expand beyond its traditional focus on bare hard drives while balancing the need to avoid competing against other storage vendors which use Seagate drives in their products.

For instance, Seagate's new BlackArmor NAS 220, a two-drive appliance with RAID 0 and 1 options and no hot-swap components, targets SOHOs and small businesses, and is a step below the company's four-drive NAS 440, said Jon van Bronkhorst, executive director of product marketing.

Seagate has no plans to go up market from its NAS 440, which was introduced in March, and will stay focused on the small and midsize business with simple products, van Bronkhorst said.

"We don't want to compete with our customers in the midrange," he said. "When you look at the SOHO market, we focus on simple storage solutions where there are not a lot of services opportunities."

Seagate has also been expanding into the storage-as-a-service market with last year's introduction of i365, a separate Seagate business unit based on technology Seagate got with its acquisition of EVault in late 2006.

Also new on Monday are two external hard drives.

The BlackArmor WS 110 workstation device includes a single 1-Tbyte or 2-Tbyte external hard drive with backup software. It includes eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces and a piano black enclosure. It is priced at $160 for the 1-Tbyte version and $310 for the 2-Tbyte version.

The BlackArmor PS 110 portable storage is thinner than the WS 110, and lists for $160 for a 500-Gbyte model.

The BlackArmor NAS 220, which is slated to ship late next month, lists for $450 for a 2-Tbyte version and $700 for a 4-Tbyte version.