With aggressive plans to elbow its way into the high-end storage market,
PC maker Gateway has inked an enterprise SAN
reseller pact with Hitachi Data Systems.
Gateway is expected to formally announce next week that it plans to resell
Hitachi’s SAN product line as part of its push into the enterprise storage
market. The Poway, Calif.-based firm also plans to be “extremely
disruptive” in pricing the SAN offerings, according to GM of systems and
networking products Scott Weinbrandt.
At an event in New York City where Gateway introduced nine new consumer
electronics products, Weinbrandt announced the average unit price of the SAN
offering would “in the range of $50,000,” much less than similar offerings
from rival Dell .
Gateway has already adopted Dell’s
server model for its enterprise storage push. The plan to offer
cut-rate pricing could trigger a drop in prices across the industry.
In an interview with internetnews.com, Weinbrandt said Gateway will make two storage-related announcements at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas next week, including a new ATA
of the cost of devices now available on the market.
A low-end storage device, targeting the small-to-midsize business market,
will retail for $6,000, much less than competitors’ offerings which go for
between $20,000 to $30,000, Weinbrandt said.
The device will include SCSI
Gateway also plans to unveil a NAS
storage) product at next week’s show which will be priced in the range of
$3000. Weinbrandt said the product will offer storage of up to 1.2
terabytes of data and will be marketed with an LCF monitor.
Weinbrandt, a former Dell executive, has been the driving force behind
Gateway’s storage strategy, which includes the sale of high-density compact servers.
The company already markets the Gateway 955 1U and the Gateway 975 2U products — compact rack-mount servers running Intel Xeon processors. The
boxes can run up to 3.06GHz with 533MHz front side bus, dual-integrated
Gigabit Ethernet network ports, and 64-bit PCI-X technology. The servers
also come with Ultra 320 SCSI Hot-Swap 10,000 RPM hard drives and can be
clustered for high compute-intensive applications.
Separately, Gateway’s chief executive Ted Waitt unveiled nine new
consumer electronics products for the Christmas shopping season. They
include a portable MP3 jukebox, a DVD recorder, two new digital cameras, two
new LCD televisions, a family room Media Center unit and a power line home
networking systems.
Waitt also introduced three new PCs including the Gateway M675 notebook,
the Gateway M505 multimedia notebook and the Gateway M275 convertible tabled
PC.
Gateway has also remodeled approximately 190 offline stores nationwide as
part of its plans to integrate consumer and enterprise offerings.
