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Dell Computer Corp. is taking a different approach to selling enterprise storage, one that more resembles the way it sells PCs.
The Round Rock, Texas, company this week will unveil its first home-grown NAS (network-attached storage) servers, which include Microsoft Corp.s Server Appliance Kit.
Dell previously resold devices from Network Appliance Inc. and Quantum Corp. The Dell servers, called the PowerVault 755N, 750N and 715N, range in capacity from 600GB to 7 terabytes. The servers are based on Dells PowerEdge series, with drives from Seagate Technology LLC, Maxtor Corp., IBM and Fujitsu Ltd., and RAID controllers from LSI Logic Corp.
They will feature dual processors, archive and snapshot capabilities, multiple RAID levels, a cache with battery backup, redundant and hot-swappable components, and browser-based management and clustering.
Dells relationship with Microsoft and its alliance to resell EMC Corp.s NAS products will help the company build the new systems in-house and offer the high-availability features and support options that Network Appliance and Quantum could not, Dell officials said.
The Dell servers, which will ship this month, are among other new storage offerings coming from major vendors.
Also in enterprise storage news this week, Sun Microsystems Inc. will launch SAN 3.0 software for its T3 series. The Palo Alto, Calif., companys SAN (storage area network) software will have larger throughput, more host ports and failover through the switching fabric, instead of just through direct connections, Sun officials said. Later this month, the company will begin reselling Hitachi Ltd.s HiCommand management software.
That deal is a result of the alliance Sun and Hitachi established in August. Hitachi launched HiCommand last month to compete against rival EMC Corp.s new AutoIS software.