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IBM and Dell Computer Corp. on Tuesday separately announced entry-level/midrange storage solutions.
Officials of IBMs Storage Systems Group announced upgrades to its network-attached storage products, including the previously announced Director 3.1 software, and new prepackaged offerings for digital media and life sciences fields.
New hardware and software options affect several NAS (network-attached storage) products from IBM TotalStorage line. The NAS 300 can now use single-phase power instead of three-phase power, now has a two-port Fibre Channel adapter for multipath failover and now supports a 10/100/1,000 Megabit Copper Ethernet adapter. The related NAS 300G series now interoperates with the TotalStorage FAStT700 Storage Server and also supports 10/100/1,000 Megabit Copper Ethernet.
The additions help increase NFS throughput by 67 percent for Unix applications and boosts the raw disk capacity of the TotalStorage NAS 200 by nearly four times with the addition of IBMs ServeRAID 4Mx adapter support, officials said. This allows 1 terabyte of additional raw disk capacity via connections to external storage.
The new Director 3.1 software enables self-managing and self-healing functions, and Storage Manager for Microsoft Corp.s SAK 2.0 supports users ability to automatically monitor end-user capacity.
In the digital media and life sciences markets, IBM announced bundles for video security, digital content creation, storage health assessment and life sciences. Complete details on those were not immediately available. A bundle for IBMs DB2 database is also new, packaged with backup and recovery products like IBMs Ultrium Linear Tape Open and Legato Systems Inc.s NetWorker for DB2 software. It will be sold through IBM and Legato resellers, officials said.
Pricing and availability for the newest IBM storage offerings were not immediately available.
Separately, officials of Dell, in Round Rock, Texas, announced a new deal to resell Boulder, Colo.-based Benchmark Storage Innovations Inc.s ValuSmart 640 Blade, branded as the PowerVault 122T. The new entry-level product fits in a 2U rack space and connects to PowerEdge NAS or PowerVault NAS, officials said. It holds eight tape cartridges for a 320GB capacity with 3MB-per-second transfer rate, or 640GB with a 6MB-per-second rate, using compression. Its available now starting at $4,150.
