* What's new in enterprise NAS
Over the past few years two companies, EMC and Network Appliance, together have commanded about 75% of the enterprise network-attached storage market (which vendor is the actual leader depends on whose hype-laden press announcements you believe). The reasons for this market leadership are many, and most certainly include technology and marketing expertise. Among the other reasons that are also worth thinking about however, is the fact that most of their big-name rivals in storage – Hitachi, HP and IBM come immediately to mind – never seemed to have been interested enough in NAS to put forth truly competitive offerings. That’s about to change, however, as those companies and several others begin to roll out new NAS lines. Whether this will impact EMC and NetApp’s slices of the pie remains to be seen.
Today, we’ll look at a new product at each end of the enterprise NAS spectrum.
HP certainly understands the import role to be played by networked storage within its Adaptive Infrastructure initiative, and is doing its best to make NAS data as much a part of this strategic direction as is data on a storage-area network. HP’s NAS1000s, announced in June, offers up to 1 terabyte of ATA disk capacity in a 1U package that starts at about $3,000. It provides multi-protocol file serving, software-based RAID, backup and antivirus support, host-based replication and IP failover support, and a snapshoting capability. This device tucks in at the bottom of HP’s NAS line, just under the NAS 2000 departmental file server, and seems to be aimed at the needs of remote offices.
Spinnaker (http://www.spinnakernetworks.com) offers a high performance device, the SpinServer 4100, which scales from 2 to 11,000 terabytes and is aimed squarely at the high-end devices from Network Appliance and EMC. The 4100 is targeted at sites that may want to cluster and centrally manage up to 512 devices that could include any mix of SCSI, Fibre Channel and ATA drives. It offers options for high-availability, snapshoting and mirroring, and includes a global file system that can be spread across both the high-end 4100 and its smaller cousin, the 3300. Pricing begins at under $50,000.
More of what’s happening in the NAS market next time.
