EMC Massages Midrange NAS

Just in case there still was any doubt that EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) is serious about its midtier NAS plunge, the company announced four new products in the space today (see EMC Broadens Midtier NAS Line).

Bulldozing straight into Network Appliance Inc.'s (Nasdaq: NTAP) heartland, EMC has started shipping three new Celerra NS600 products that the company says are less expensive than the current model, as well as the low-end NetWin 200 NAS system it developed with Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT).

EMC has no problem admitting that it envisions its main NAS competitor dressed in a huge target costume come Halloween. We’re really going after the core of [NetApp's] product line,” says Bob Wambach, senior product marketing manager at EMC.

Arun Taneja, founder of consulting firm Taneja Group, says EMC wants to cover the entire NAS space. “The competition just got a little bit more difficult for NetApp,” he says. However, he adds, NetApp isn’t going to just roll over and die: “They know how to compete in the midtier.”

EMC has been playing in the midtier NAS market since late last year, when it launched its original Celerra NS600 box. But with a list price starting at $167,000, analysts at the time complained that the filer was quite pricey (see EMC Darts Into Midtier NA$).Now, EMC is delivering a new entry-level version of its NS600 -- the NS600S -- as well as offering the technology in two different gateway versions, the NS600G and the NS600GS. With the new models, EMC says it has been able to bring down the price to a more competitive midrange level.

The NS600G and the NS600GS are NAS gateways that allow customers to integrate NAS functionality with EMC’s Clariion CX600 and CX400 SAN arrays, and enable SAN and NAS functionality to coexist in a single system. The NS600G, which has dual data movers, is priced starting at $97,000, while the NS600GS, with a single data mover configuration, has a starting list price of $63,000.

Prices for both gateways also include support for the CIFS protocol, SnapSure backup software, a two-year hardware warranty, and a 90-day software warranty.

“We’ve taken the head component of the NS600, and we’re selling it on its own,” says Tom Joyce, EMC’s director of NAS product marketing. “Many of these customers already have a big investment in SANs... Now they can have NAS in what they’ve already bought.”

The NS600S, meanwhile, is a fully integrated, entry-level version of the Celerra NS600. While it doesn’t provide customers with the flexibility or the SAN connectivity options the gateways do, it provides an attractive entry point, Joyce says. If you want to build the best stereo ever, you buy all the components and put it together yourself, he says. But if you want to play some music on the beach, you’ll just buy a boom-box.The NS600S includes a single data mover, and provides customers with an online upgrade to a high-availability configuration with two data movers. List pricing for a 1-Tbyte configuration is $114,000. EMC says the system offers performance of 25,656 operations per second on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) file server benchmark -- and Joyce claims that it far outpaces NetApp’s FAS940 and FAS960 filers on both performance and price. According to EMC, the NS600S delivers $4.44 per ops/sec, while the FAS960 offers $7.73 per ops/sec and the FAS940 is $8.60 per ops/sec.

NetApp, however, dismisses its competitor's price/performance improvements, claiming that EMC's disparate systems and architectures cause customers more problems than they solve.

"With radically different platforms and incompatible software packages for mirroring and other tasks, EMC forces its customers into a constant resource tradeoff at every migration or scalability decision point," a NetApp spokesman writes in an email. "A host of new systems at certain price/performance points doesn't in any way change this customer dilemma or pain."

Joyce, for his part, insists that midrange customers will benefit from EMC's exhaustive experience at the high end. He says the new NS600 products are based on the same NAS operating system the company has been using for years at the high end. “Customers have come to expect high-end capabilities, but in the midtier and with midtier pricing,” he says. “We’ve battle-tested it in the very high end, and now we’re scaling that thing down to the midtier.”

To drive pricing down further, EMC is also offering ATA drive support for all of its integrated Celerra NS600 systems and Celerra Clustered Network Server (CNS) environments. The company says its Clariion customers can choose to use ATA drives for applications like disk-based backup from its partners, which include CommVault Systems Inc., Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA), Legato Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: LGTO), and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS). Clariion systems shipping with ATA drives offer significantly lower performance than those with Fibre Channel drives, but EMC points out that they will also only cost about half as much as the Fibre Channel models.Finally, EMC has finally started shipping the NetWin 200 NAS system it developed for the new Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 platform (see Microsoft Raises NAS Roof). The box, which combines a Windows server front-end with EMC’s Clariion CX200 storage array in a 500-Gbyte configuration, costs $32,000.

EMC is planning to sell the NetWin 200 through channel partners, but Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) -- the largest reseller of the company's midrange Clariion storage systems -- says it will not be adding the new NAS system to its portfolio.

"We are not reselling the NetWin product because we already sell our own PowerVault 770N and 775N," says Dell spokeswoman Michelle Hanson. She adds that Dell's Windows-powered PowerVault NAS products are already available with EMC's CX200, CX400, or CX600 arrays. Depending on the configuration, PowerVault costs between $5,000 and $25,000.

Joyce admits it could take some time for NetWinn 200 sales to pick up. “EMC selling Windows is a new thing,” he says. “It’s going to take a little longer, but we’ve got great expectations for that product.”

No matter how long it takes to bear fruit, the EMC-Microsoft relationship is bad news for NetApp, which is desperately lacking in low-end products, analysts say. With EMC determinedly tunneling its way deep into the midtier from the top, and moving up the stack with Microsoft from the bottom, NetApp could find itself sandwiched into a very narrow space.“NetApp is going to have to respond with some products of their own for the low-end,” Taneja says. “If they let the low-end go to EMC... it could spread out like cancer all over the place.”

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch