IBM Wednesday announced hardware and software to help
medium-sized businesses easily and effectively cope with their storage
needs.
At the center of IBM’s new offerings is the new TotalStorage Network
Attached Storage 100 (NAS 100), a thin appliance referred to as a “pizza
box,” which will be available next month. According to the company, the NAS
100 will allow mid-sized businesses to manage their storage needs without a
big IT staff. It joins IBM’s NAS 200 and NAS 300 offerings.
“Our commitment to introducing the best technology available to customers of
all sizes is proven again with this latest introduction of the NAS 100,”
said Walter Raizner, IBM’s general manager of storage products, in a
statement.
The NAS 100 includes software developed out of IBM’s
Project eLiza which began in October 2001. Project eLiza strives to
create a nervous system capable of automatically regulating IT functions.
The NAS 100 will be capable of managing and healing itself, and in the
process, IBM claimed, save companies money and time from managing and
troubleshooting the system.
“Most of the growth occurring in the storage market is not the real large enterprise; it’s the small-to medium-sized enterprises that are spending more on storage these days,” said Dianne McAdam, an analyst with IT consultancy Illuminata. “It’s a smaller solution that may allow them to take their product into the smaller marketplace.”
In the mid-market, IBM’s NAS offerings compete with NAS products from Dell and Network Appliance. With an aggressive push into the storage market over the last few years, IBM settled into the No. 3 position in 2001, trailing EMC and Veritas Software, according to research by Gartner Dataquest.
IBM said companies would be able to use the NAS 100 for such tasks as e-mail
archiving, server consolidation, storage backup, and archiving documents.
With a $4,420 price tag and a half hour installation time, IBM is taking
clear aim at medium-sized businesses or branch locations of larger
companies.
The NAS 100 runs on Windows and can hold up to 480Gb of data. The system can
be managed by a variety of storage-management software, including IBM
Director and Tivoli Storage Manager.
Its self-healing features include hot-swappable hard disk drives for
replacing drives without interruption; automatic monitoring of fans and
processors; and automatic operating system and local area network fail-over
capabilities.
In addition to the NAS 100, IBM unveiled a new 2Gb solution and 2Gb
fibre-channel disk drives for its FAStT storage
expansion unit, allowing 40 percent more capacity with the FAStT EXP700.
IBM said the new disk drives would help medium-sized businesses by improving
the performance of large database applications.
