Storage Vendors Squeeze into Small Business

EMC wants to help midsized companies manage and archive their fixed content more cost-effectively, while Maxtor goes even smaller with its new server backup solution, Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition.

The lucrative nature of the small and midsized business market continues to prompt storage vendors to release products geared toward grabbing a bigger piece of the SMB pie.

EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., on Monday announced that it has introduced an entry-level configuration for its Centera CAS (content-addressed storage) systems designed to attract the midsized business market.

The new four-node configuration, as well as the new capability to rack-mount the four-node configuration in a variety of industry-standard racks and at a lower cost point, will help midsized companies more cost-effectively manage and archive fixed content, said Tom Heiser, senior vice president of EMCs Centera division.

EMC blends virtual file systems and storage-management software in its EMC Celerra NSX NAS gateway. Click here to read more.

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Maxtor Corp. of Milpitas, Calif., is focusing on the smaller end of the SMB market with its new server backup solution for small businesses. The Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition, offered at 200GB, backs up as much as 300GB of compressed data via USB 2.0 cable.

The drive allows small businesses to perform automatic backups and fast restores along with remote notification for backup status and simple storage management for small-business Windows servers.

The Maxtor OneTouch II Small Business Edition is an offshoot of the companys Maxtor OneTouch II drive, offered in 80, 120, 160, 200 and 250 GB versions.

The new drive is bundled with EMC Dantz Retrospect Express HD Server software with open file backup support, a feature that helps protect database applications that must run 24x7 or files accidentally left open at the end of the day, said Stacey Lund, vice president of marketing for Maxtors branded products group. The drive, which retails for $600, also offers the companys DriveLock technology to password-protect the drives contents.

In an effort to allow companies to increase their storage capacity as they grow, Engenio Information Technologies Inc. has certified that the Brocade SilkWorm 4100 SAN (storage area network) switch is now compatible with Engenios 6998 4Gb/sec Fibre Channel storage system.

Engenios 6998 Fibre Channel array offers advanced replication services, remote volume mirroring and volume copying, while the 6998 controller uses the companys XBB architecture to offer fast cache memory, 4GB/s Fibre Channel host and drive interfaces, high-speed busses and multiple processing elements.

Click here to read about Hewlett-Packard Co. breathing life into its enterprise storage line.

Using the Brocade Silkworm 4100, offered in small configurations of eight port fabric switches to large, full-featured directors, Engenio customers can now build a 4Gb/s Fibre Channel infrastructure to support their performance demands as their storage needs grow, said Julie Ryan, manager of alliances at Milpitas, Calif.-based Engenio.

The Silkworm 4100 also is backward-compatible with Engenios 1GB/s and 2GB/s Fibre Channel SAN devices, allowing Engenio customers to protect their investment in existing Engenio products.

Finally, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., announced that it has agreed to purchase all intellectual property rights of Procom Technology Inc., a NAS (network-attached storage) storage systems vendor based in Irvine, Calif.

The move will allow Sun to compete in the NAS marketplace by offering lower-cost NAS appliances, said Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun. Schwartz also said the purchase will afford Sun access to additional engineering expertise, enabling it to build future NAS and next-generation, file-based storage systems faster and more cost-effectively.

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