Intel Aims Storage at the Little Guy

Intel unveiled a new storage platform Thursday aimed at making it easier for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) to improve their disaster recovery and backup capabilities.

Hans Geyer, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Storage Group, called the new offerings “a simple, affordable solution based on a flexible set of standards-based building blocks that has the power to scale with the growing mountains of data.”

The Intel Storage System SSR212MA is a “white box” hardware and software solution that lets SMBs build storage area networks (SANs) based on IP networking standards as a low-cost complement or alternative to Fibre Channel-based solutions. Using a single Intel Xeon processor, the platform supports up to 12 SATA hard drives and iSCSI connectivity, which allows SANs to be built on existing IP network infrastructures.

The platform comes standard with software tools to manage geographically diverse storage resources. From a central console, a customer can configure and manage the SAN, configure and provision volumes quickly without system downtime, make incremental copies of data volumes, and authenticate users for improved data security, Intel said.

Optional features include disaster recover capabilities from natural disasters and outages affecting an entire site.

The Intel Storage System SSR212MA is available from participating Intel Channel members. It complements Intel’s Storage System SSR316MJ2, a dual-processor, 16-drive, iSCSI/Fibre Channel offering. Intel did not provide pricing on the new offerings.

More information on Intel’s storage systems can be found at: www.intel.com/products/server/storage/index.htm.

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