EMC (NYSE: EMC) has lowered the entry point for its wildly popular Celerra unified storage offerings.

The new Celerra NX4 starts at $20,300, about $12,000 less than the fast-growing NS20. Users sacrifice a little performance and scalability for that price, but it also broadens the market for one of EMC's most popular products.

Brad Bunce, EMC's director of Celerra product marketing, said the ability to manage multiple protocols — CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel — from a single box is "very attractive, especially in the SMB space.

"It's clearly going to resonate in the SMB space," he added.

The NX4 is built on the Clariion AX4, rather than the higher-end Clariion CX that the NS20 is based on. That allows the NX4 to mix SAS and SATA drives, but not high-performance Fibre Channel drives.

The new offering doesn't quite get EMC down into the $10,000 to $15,000 price point that would attract smaller businesses, which leaves room for competitors like NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), although EMC has its Iomega NAS line at the very low end.

But for users willing to pay the $20,000 entry fee, the NX4 offers plenty of performance and features: high availability, 4TB of storage with scalability to 60TB (the NS20 now reaches 90TB), management tools, thin provisioning and snapshots, and a 4Gbps Fibre Channel option — and EMC claims it can be up and running in 15 minutes.

The Celerra NX4 supports Microsoft, Unix, Linux and VMware (NYSE: VMW) ESX Server operating environments, and Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and VMware Site Recovery Manager.

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This article courtesy of Enterprise Storage Forum