EMC, Dell Hit New Low in Midrange Storage

EMC and Dell  are introducing the CX3-10 UltraScale FC/iSCSI system today, a storage area network (SAN)  array that marks a new entry point with EMC’s Clariion machines for the medium-sized customer.

Designed to sock away data in businesses with anywhere from 250 to 2,500 employees, the CX3-10 is geared to handle the glut of data in e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, or enterprise resource planning apps from Oracle or SAP.

The trick is to meet such requirements at a reasonable cost, a balancing act something that EMC, Dell and rivals HP , IBM , NetApp have been trying to pull off in the multi-million-dollar midrange SAN market.

“Although these mid-size business have big requirements — information in these businesses is growing rapidly — they may not have big staffs or big budgets,” said Katie Curtin-Mestre, director of Clariion product marketing at EMC. “Our focus at EMC is economical solutions for these mid-size enterprises.”

The CX3-10 supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity. This combination is an important selling point for customers because traditional machines don’t support both on the same machine, forcing business to buy separate machines to manage Fibre Channel, or the lower costing iSCSI protocols.

Because of its lower cost, iSCSI presents an attractive entry point for customers moving into networked storage from network-attached storage (NAS) or direct-attached storage (DAS) for the first time.

EMC began offering iSCSI and Fibre Channel support on its CX3-20, CX3-40 and CX3-80 UltraScale systems last October.

The CX3-10, which spans from 5 to 60 drives and stores up to 30 terabytes of data, also includes EMC’s Navisphere Task Bar to make managing the box a snap for moderately tech-savvy users who can’t look to a storage administrator for help.

Replication software for non-disruptive backup, PowerPath load balancing and path-failover software, an option for all-SATA configurations and an option to procure low-cost Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters are also part of the CX3-10 package.

The CX3-10 starts at $27,000.

Mestre said EMC has also issued RecoverPoint/SE, a version of the company’s long-distance disaster recovery software that supports CLARiiON CX and CX3 systems.

RecoverPoint/SE also features a bandwidth-reduction option that helps customers pare their replication costs by reducing the amount of data sent over the line by up to a factor of 10, yielding significant cost savings. The product is for Windows hosts between Clariions and supports up to 4 terabytes of capacity.

RecoverPoint/SE is $10,000 per array.

Dell is offering its own version of the machine, branded the Dell/EMC CX3-10c, according to Praveen Asthana, Dell’s director of storage.

“When we came out with the CX3-20 CX3-40 and CX3-80 with EMC, we noticed a gap between the DAS products and the CX line, so we worked with EMC to come out with the CX3-10,” Asthana said.

To accompany the CX3-10c, Dell today issued two new tape libraries the PowerVault TL 2000 and the PowerVault TL4000 to provide automated data protection at a cost of traditional autoloaders.

The pairing of a CX3-10c with the TL2000 or TL4000 will help SMB consolidate storage systems and handle growing capacity needs.