EMC Expands NAS Offerings

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EMC is expanding its network-attached storage (NAS) offerings with two new midrange options and a high-end product.The new Celerra NS500 and NS500G are lower-cost integrated NAS storage and NAS gateway offerings, respectively, while the new Celerra NS704G gateway is targeted at customers needing high-performance and availability.

The new offerings complement the NS600 series announced last year and the NS700models unveiled earlier this year.

The new NAS products offer what Tom Joyce, EMC’s senior director of NAS, claims is superior price-performance over competitive offerings from Network Appliance and IBM .”They’re very, very competitive based on performance,” Joyce told Enterprise Storage Forum. “They can line up well with anything in the space.”

EMC has also added iSCSI target support, an improved SnapSure GUI, better Windows integration, “at a glance” monitoring information, and improved backup and restore using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS).

A new version of EMC’s DART operating environment includes enhancements to the Celerra Manager Basic Edition. With iSCSI support, Celerra systems will offer SAN/NAS integration, with a “single box” file and block IP storage solution that consolidates both file and block storage into a single, centrally managed platform.

The Celerra NS500 starts at $40,000 for a 1TB, single data mover, integrated configuration, with CIFS and SnapSure, with an upgrade path to the NS700/704G. At 25,000 NFS operations per second, Joyce says the NS500’s performance exceeds that of the $120,000 Network Appliance FAS960 at a price that’s lower than NetApp’s $52,000 FAS270.

The high-availability Celerra NS704G lists for $165,000 for a four-data-mover configuration with CIFS and SnapSure. At 100,000 NFS operations per second, Joyce says the NS704G offers better performance than the NetApp GF960C and the IBM TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 for 30-50% less.

“To a greater and greater extent, customers need to use both NAS and SAN,” Joyce says. “That’s what these gateways are about.”

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