EMC, Dell Aim Low with CX200

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Looking to develop a presence in the lucrative low-end computer storage
market, Mass.-based EMC Corp. on Monday unveiled the
CLARiiON CX200 network storage system, a new device co-designed and built in
partnership with Dell Computer .

An announcement from EMC made no mention of Dell’s involvement in the CX200
system which touts the “entry-level price point” but published reports say the
launch of the product is an extension of a one-year-old
partnership between the two companies.

Officials from EMC and Dell are expected to shed light on the partnership in
a Monday afternoon conference call and sources say the Austin, TX-based
Dell will highlight plans to move deeper into the storage business by
targeting low-end clients.

The original deal announced last October called for Dell to be the number
one reseller of EMC’s CLARiiON product line. CLARiiON is Dell’s standard
offering for storage area networks (SAN) and high-end network-attached
storage (NAS) installations.

Now, the two companies are turning to the low-priced, low-end market to
stave off competition from rivals. The $30,000 CLARiiON CX200 system, which
can scale to more than 2 trillion bits in capacity, supports Windows 2000,
NT, Linux and Novell Netware environments. The CX200 delivers 25,000 I/Os
per second of throughput and 200 megabytes per second of bandwidth in cached
environments, EMC said.

It is the third storage product coming out of the EMC/Dell partnership and
it shares the same architecture, components, management software and FLARE
operating environment with the other two high-end systems — CLARiiON CX600
and CLARiiON CX400.

It said the CLARiiON CX200 product would be sold primarily through Dell and
other partners like Fujitsu-Siemens, Comparex, Unisys, Stratus, Arrow
Electronics Inc. and Bell Micro/Ideal.

“The CX200 brings customers even greater value from simple, automated and
open management through products such as PowerPath channel failover and
intelligent path management as well as the EMC ControlCenter family of
applications like Navisphere and StorageScope,” the company said.

For Dell, the expanded deal signals its continued push into the storage
space, which was highlighted earlier this month with the rollout of a
storage device for the enterprise market.

Dell’s new network storage system aimed at business continuance was aimed at
helping technology systems maintain operations through power outages,
technology failures, human error and natural disasters.

The Dell EMC CX400 is a 2Gbps Fibre Channel array storage device
featuring data protection features, and is being hailed as an “ideal platform”
for multimedia and video streaming, Microsoft Exchange clustering,
medium-sized Oracle and SQL databases, for storage area network (SAN) and
direct-attach storage environments.

Dell and EMC have designed the CX200 to provide an upgrade path through the
higher-end systems. As application or consolidation requirements expand, the
company said clients easily upgrade, through a storage processor swap, with
data-in-place, to the CX400 or CX600 networked storage systems.

EMC also announced tailored versions of its Navisphere and PowerPath
software suited for CX200 requirements.