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Gateway Inc. this week is launching its first storage products and has refreshed its two-way server as it continues its push into the enterprise, part of a larger plan to move away from its roots as a PC maker.
The Poway, Calif., company this year has released six servers and now wants to use those to enter the storage space, according to Scott Weinbrandt, general manager of Gateways Systems and Networking Products group. The goal is to become a single vendor for SMBs (small and midsize businesses) instead of having them turn elsewhere for their infra-structure needs.
Toward that end, the Gateway 850 SCSI JBOD is a 2U (3.5-inch) chassis holding up to 1.7 terabytes in 12 hot-swappable Ultra 320 drives, Weinbrandt said. It has dual power supplies and uses controller and RAID cards from LSI Logic Corp., he said.
Weinbrandt said future versions will use Serial ATA drives. Meanwhile, SMB users who need a tape library now have the Gateway 820 LTO Autoloader option, made by Certance LLC, of Costa Mesa, Calif. Also 2U high, it uses the Linear Tape-Open 1 format, with one drive and an eight-cartridge carousel, Weinbrandt said. It will hold 1.6 terabytes raw, compressed at a 2-1 ratio.
Pricing for the 850 SCSI JBOD starts at $2,999 and for the Autoloader at $5,799. Both are available immediately, officials said. Gateway is also reselling the popular Backup Exec 9.0 software from Veritas Software Corp., of Mountain View, Calif., and Tapeware XE 7.0 from Yosemite Technologies Inc., of Fresno, Calif., they said.
As Serial ATA products arent ready for production yet, NAS (network-attached storage) later this year will probably use Microsoft Corp.s Windows Storage Server 2003, and iSCSI links are a strong possibility, Weinbrandt said.
The moves are Gateways second foray in the storage space, after a brief stint in 2001 with NAS.
In addition to the new storage products, Gateway last week released a refreshed two-way server, the 960X, bringing redundancy features to SMBs and to workgroups, Weinbrandt said. It has dual Xeon chips from Intel Corp., four hot-swappable drives, optional redundant power supplies and six PCI slots, he said.
The 5U (8.75-inch) server can run Microsofts Windows 2000 Server, Server 2003 and Small Business Server 2000, as well as Red Hat Inc.s Red Hat Linux. Its available immediately in rack-mounted or tower configurations starting at $1,399, Weinbrandt said.
Dennis Linster, CIO at Wayne State College, said redundancy in systems is crucial to enable those systems to continue running even if a component fails. “If you lose a power supply and you have a redundant one, youre OK,” said Linster, in Wayne, Neb. “Weve got redundancy [in those servers], and its saved us a number of times.”
The 960X update comes less than a month after Gateway launched its largest server, the four-way 995, and enhanced support options through IBM Global Services. Weinbrandt reiterated that Gateway has no plans to go higher than four processors. There is little demand for eight-way systems, and with four-way servers using Intels Hyper-Threading Xeon MPs, “youre virtually looking at eight-way servers anyway,” he said.