EMC, LSI, IBM, Iomega roll out midrange, SMB arrays

Developments of the week in storage

EMC, LSI, IBM and Iomega last week unveiled their most recent mid-range and SMB arrays. EMC announced that it added virtualization-aware features to it CLARiiON CX4 storage systems. Among the enhancement were making the Navisphere storage management interface virtualization aware. Navisphere is now able to automatically discover and maintain relationships between logical and physical machines. Also added to the CLARiiON CX4 is support for 10Gbps iSCSI and 8Gbps Fibre Channel UltraFlex capability – these two technologies can be intermixed in the same array.

EMC also announced that its near continuous data protection environment, Recoverpoint, can now manage replicated storage for physical and virtual machines. The company claims that 8Gbps Fibre Channel is available now and that 10Gbps iSCSI is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year. The new versions of Navisphere Manager and RecoverPoint are available now. Replication manager is also expected in the third quarter.

LSI also announced last week a new storage system, the Engenio 4900 storage system, which as support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 1Gbps iSCSI. The 4900 is a modular architecture that allows customers to grow capacity to as much as 112 Fibre Channel or Serial ATA drives, including self-encrypting drives. IBM will OEM the Engenio 4900 and rebrand it as the IBM System Storage DS5020 Express.

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EMC, LSI, IBM and Iomega last week unveiled their most recent mid-range and SMB arrays. EMC announced that it added virtualization-aware features to it CLARiiON CX4 storage systems. Among the enhancement were making the Navisphere storage management interface virtualization aware. Navisphere is now able to automatically discover and maintain relationships between logical and physical machines. Also added to the CLARiiON CX4 is support for 10Gbps iSCSI and 8Gbps Fibre Channel UltraFlex capability – these two technologies can be intermixed in the same array.

EMC also announced that its near continuous data protection environment, Recoverpoint, can now manage replicated storage for physical and virtual machines. The company claims that 8Gbps Fibre Channel is available now and that 10Gbps iSCSI is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year. The new versions of Navisphere Manager and RecoverPoint are available now. Replication manager is also expected in the third quarter.

LSI also announced last week a new storage system, the Engenio 4900 storage system, which as support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel and 1Gbps iSCSI. The 4900 is a modular architecture that allows customers to grow capacity to as much as 112 Fibre Channel or Serial ATA drives, including self-encrypting drives. IBM will OEM the Engenio 4900 and rebrand it as the IBM System Storage DS5020 Express.

Finally, Iomega on Thursday introduced a four-drive NAS appliance, the StorCenter ix4-200d, which is says is optimized for the SMB market. The ix4-200d has an iSCSI interface, supports Windows Active Directory and multiple RAID configurations. In addition for an appliance of its size, Iomega offers device-to-device replication for disaster recovery and business continuity. The ix4-200d can be configured with as many as four Serial ATA drives. A 2TB StorCenter ix4-200d NAS appliance is now available for $699; the 4TB model is $899, and the 8TB model is $1,900.

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Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.