Gateway Takes Wraps Off New Servers, Storage

Gateway Takes Wraps Off New Servers, Storage
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Gateway announced details of its expected new storage and server products today.BOSTON—Gateway Inc. announced details of its expected new storage and server products today.

The companys product diversification—which recently added consumer electronics on the heels of layoffs, negative earnings and store closings—now also includes JBOD (just a bunch of disks) enclosures, tape libraries, and soon, network-attached storage, said Scott Weinbrandt, general manager, systems and networking products group. The new servers refresh older 960-series models, he said.

The new Gateway 850 SCSI JBOD, built with an undisclosed partner company, is a 2U chassis holding up to 1.7TB in 12 hot-swappable Ultra 320 drives, Weinbrandt said. It has dual power supplies and uses controller and RAID cards from Milpitas, Calif.s LSI Logic Corp., he said.

Resource Library:

Meanwhile, the Gateway 820 LTO Autoloader comes from Certance LLC, the Costa Mesa, Calif., former division of Seagate Technologies LLC. Also 2U, the autoloader uses the Linear Tape-Open 1 format, through one drive and an eight-cartridge carousel, Weinbrandt said. That can hold up to 1.6TB raw, compressed at 2:1, officials noted.

JBOD pricing starts at $2,999, and the autoloader is $5,799; both are available Aug. 26, officials of the Poway, Calif., company said. Gateway is also reselling the popular Backup Exec 9.0 software from Mountain View, Calif.s Veritas Software Corp., and Tapeware XE 7.0 from Fresno, Calif.s Yosemite Technologies Inc., officials said.

"The one thing I can say that theyre doing right, if theyre going to do it all, is they have put their storage products with their server products. At least theyre doing that correctly," said industry analyst Brad Nisbet, of International Data Corp. "Theyre not biting off more than they can chew. Theres still a good business to be had in JBOD," he said, in Framingham, Mass. Gateways future expansion into even lower-end products is smart, but any success they find in higher-end products is probably "not anytime soon," he noted.

The storage moves are actually the second try for Gateway, which began reselling three versions of Maxtor Corp.s network-attached storage hardware in April 2001 but "never had any significant sales," Nisbet said. Gateway discontinued that later in the year, and Maxtor itself, of Milpitas, exited the NAS business in August 2002.

Later this year, "were definitely moving upstream and downstream," Weinbrandt added. That includes arrays with serial ATA drives, another try at NAS, and iSCSI links, he said.

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