Iomega Revs Up Storage Lines

omega, which turns 25 years old in April, is celebrating by sharing its road map for its professional storage product line through the first quarter of next year.

The San Diego-based vendor plans to enhance its hardware and software with an eye toward more automation of storage for smaller customers, nearly all of which Iomega serves via solution providers, said Wayne Arvidson, director of professional solutions at Iomega.

Iomega is stepping up its focus on that space because while the bulk of small businesses manage storage capacities of less than 2 Tbytes, they are becoming concerned about many of the same issues as larger customers, including compliance, content creation and e-mail archiving, Arvidson said.

Iomega plans to increase the capacity of its Rev line of removable hard drives, based on standard 2.5-inch hard-drive technology, next year, he said. After that, the company will boost the drives’ capacities to several hundred Gbytes.

The company also plans to introduce a Rev desktop microloader with one drive slot and space for multiple Rev cartridges early in the fourth quarter, Arvidson said.

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Iomega, which currently offers a rack-mount, carousel-based 10-cartridge Rev autoloader, hopes to add a new desktop autoloader with two removable 12-cartridge magazines by year’s end, he said.

The Rev family is a terrific option for customers looking for tape alternatives, said Scott Sabellico, vice president of sales and marketing at New Dimensions, a Troy, Mich.-based solution provider. “It’s a great fit for folks who want to get away from tape in small businesses where customers don’t have stable disaster recovery or backup/restore plans in place,” he said.

Iomega is also planning to update its NAS lines, Arvidson said. On tap this spring for the NAS 100d is USB 2.0 support for plugging in portable hard drives or Rev drives to add capacity quickly, as well as enhanced wireless security and a doubling of capacity to up to 500 Gbytes. Its embedded operating system will be enhanced for automatic backups, he said.

Iomega expects this month to bump up capacity for its NAS 200d to three 250-Gbyte hard drives from today’s maximum of 480 Gbytes. At the same time, the company will update the appliance’s image to support hot backups of Microsoft Exchange. It will also be given an extra slot for backing up to a Rev drive, Arvidson said.

Sabellico said the ability to connect a Rev drive to an Iomega NAS appliance will allow small businesses to take advantage of disk-to-disk backup capabilities. “They can back up to a Rev, take it off-site and vault it,” he said.

New for the third quarter this year will be the NAS 300r, a rack-mount storage appliance with two hot-swappable 160-Gbyte or 250-Gbyte hard drives, Arvidson said. In the third quarter, Iomega plans to refresh its 400r family of NAS appliances with the ability to recover from an operating system crash by using a DVD, he said.

Iomega’s NAS appliances have been a sweet spot for New Dimensions’ small-business customers, Sabellico said. “A lot of small businesses don’t have a SAN, so they buy more servers, which means more management and manpower issues,” he said.

Iomega intends to enhance a number of its software applications and capabilities over the rest of the year. One new addition, scheduled for later this year, is a Boot & Run option to start up servers using a Rev drive for system recovery in case of a complete system failure, Arvidson said. It is already in public beta. By early next year, Boot & Run will be enhanced to support more NTFS systems and allow integration into a NAS appliance, he said.

Boot & Run is a fantastic feature for small businesses, Sabellico said. “Folks who spend thousands and thousands of dollars on bare metal recovery can use the Rev instead,” he said.