Gateway Keys Storage Push at Comdex

Looking for elbow room in the crowded enterprise storage market, Gateway used the annual Comdex show in Las Vegas Tuesday as its soapbox to launch a slew of new storage products.


The Poway, Calif.-based company, which held a consumer electronics-oriented
media event last week in New York City in which it alluded
to the major enterprise push, unveiled two new storage devices, systems
management software and partnerships with both Hitachi Data Systems (HDS)
and SuSe Linux.


Gateway will have its work cut out if it wants to compete with IBM ,
HP and EMC . While pumping out products similar to what rival vendors manufactured a few years ago, Gateway has been unveiling new devices at
a prodigious clip, and seems confident in its ability to undercut
competitors by offering low prices.


The outfit, which is also in the midst of a large consumer electronics push
with plasma TVs as the main attraction, unveiled the Gateway 860
network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, the first NAS product
from Gateway in more than two years.


It is a Serial ATA-based rackmount device designed to run on Microsoft’s
young Windows Storage Server 2003 and plugs straight into an Ethernet
network and can hold up to 1TB of data. The 860 NAS serves as a virtual
“shared drive” for all network users and is targeted at small- and
medium-sized businesses, government agencies and educational institutions


Accompanying this machine is the Gateway 840 SATA Enclosure, a 2U rackmount
appliance that attaches directly to servers. Like the NAS 860, it is based
on Serial ATA technology, making it less expensive than SCSI
drives. Serial ATA is exploding as a popular alternative
to parallel data connection transfer and some vendors, such as Gateway, are
positioning it as a less-costly alternative to other transfer technologies.


In other product news, Gateway launched its latest systems management
software, Gateway System Manager (GSM) 3.0, which gives IT administrators a
tool to manage systems from afar with the Web. Mirroring systems management
software from IBM, HP and CA , Gateway’s GSM informs administrators about predictive system failures and provides logs and reports of system changes and problems.


In fact, GSM is standards-based and compatible with all major enterprise
consoles, including IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol and HP OpenView.
Dell launched
its systems management software offering bolstered by Microsoft’s support
last week.


As previously reported, Gateway has also embarked on a partnership with
Hitachi Data Systems, marking the company’s entrance into the storage area
network (SAN) arena. Gateway will sell Hitachi’s Thunder 9500 V
Series modular storage systems and software to SMB, corporate, education and
government accounts in the U.S. and Canada.


Lastly, Gateway Tuesday vowed to sell and support SUSE LINUX across its
entire servers line in another example of how Linux is gaining widespread
acceptance in the enterprise market as an alternative to Microsoft Windows
operating system environments.


SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 is now offered with Gateway’s 955, 975, and
995 rackmount servers and its Gateway 960 and 980 tower servers for
high-performance computing, while SuSE Standard Server 8 is geared for the
“edge” of the network and is now offered with Gateway’s 920, 955, 960, 975
and 980 servers for file/print, web serving, mail, cache, and firewall
deployments.

Product pricing: the NAS 860 begins at $3,199 for the 320GB model and comes
with four 80GB serial ATA drives, while the 840 SATA Enclosure begins at a
base price of $3,949 for the 320GBmodel and $7,199 for the 3TB version and
comes standard with three Serial ATA drives. Both devices will ship
mid-December, as will the Gateway Systems Manager 3.0, which will be free
with every Gateway server and managed storage product.

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