EMC fattens up around its NAS

Celerra line widens

By Ashlee Vance in Chicago • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 31st August 2004 10:15 GMT

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EMC today fleshed out its network attached storage (NAS) product line with a pair of new midrange systems and support for the iSCSI protocol.

The storage vendor made a clear attack against rival Network Appliance with the new Celerra NS500. This system starts at $40,000 for 1TB of storage, CIFS support and EMC's SnapSure snapshot software. EMC claims the new box comes in at a price 27 percent lower than NetApp's FAS270 product.

A little higher up the line, EMC introduced the Celerra NS704G. This box ships in a four file-server configuration as opposed to the NS500 that can only reach a two file-server configuration. The box starts at $165,000 and enjoys a 65 percent price/performance edge over NetApp's Gf960C, according to EMC.

On the software side, EMC upgraded its DART operating system to support the iSCSI protocol for sending large blocks of data over IP. EMC also added a new GUI to DART that shows CPU usage, performance, I/O data, active network connections, storage usage and open files. In addition, the software has been tuned to work with Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) software.

Both EMC and NetApp are coming off strong recent quarters in which storage largely outperformed other parts of the hardware market. ®