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IBM Refreshes NAS Lineup
Upgrades NAS and iSCSI appliances and pumps another $100M into networked storage R&D
October 31, 2001
2 Min Read
IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) has beefed up its NAS products with more capacity and processing power and plans to spend $100 million on its network storage group over the next year (see IBM Enhances NAS Wares).
In addition, Big Blue has taken the wraps off a midrange storage server, the FAStT 700, concluding a 15-month reseller agreement with Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ).
The move comes a week after Compaq marked the termination of its agreement to resell IBMs high-end Shark storage array with the introduction of its own product into this sector.
The FAStT 700 provides Fibre Channel connectivity that supports data transfer rates of up to 2 Gbit/s, remote copy and flashcopy features, and up to 120,000 cached input/output (I/O) operations per second, according to IBM. These measurements are more than double the performance of the CLARiiON 4700 from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM claims.
The upgraded NAS products include:
TotalStorage Network Attached Storage Models 200 and 300, which feature increased storage capacity of up to 400 gigabytes on the 200 and 6.6 terabytes on the 300. The network interface card common to both models now has four rather than one Ethernet port to support greater data protection. And the NAS 300G (Gateway) model now offers additional fault tolerance.
TotalStorage IP Storage 200i, which now provides up to double the capacity of older models (3.5 terabytes). This device also offers faster performance with new 1.13Ghz Pentium III processors, providing a 35 percent throughput improvement, IBM says.“We’ve gone from not much presence at all in the NAS market early this year, to products in June and now significant upgrades,” says Chris Saul, product manager for IBM’s Shark group. He said plans are underway to use the new $100 million in funding to enhance the capacity and power of these appliances even further, but he was unable to provide a roadmap for this.
Analysts were largely unimpressed by the announcements. “These are small, departmental products,” says Arun Taneja, senior analyst at the Enterprise Storage Group Inc. “IBM needs to move upscale with its NAS product line… It is nowhere near BlueArc Corp., for example, in terms of performance.” He adds that it will take significantly more funding than IBM announced today, to build a product in this space.
— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch http://www.byteandswitch.com
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