EMC Targets Midtier NAS Market - Company Business and Marketing

Known for its high-end NAS and SAN offerings, EMC is turning its attention to the midlevel NAS market with the launch of Clariion IP 4700. The move represents EMC's first official foray into the midmarket NAS space. There it will complete against the likes of Network Appliance, among others.

A NAS file server that attaches to an IP network, Clariion IP 4700 includes high-availability features, an average 10 minute installation time, the ability to scale up to 3.6 TB in rack-mountable increments, and a range of network connections. It is designed to compete against the clustered approach of other NAS vendors. The differentiating factor and main selling point of IP 4700 is that it has no single point of failure. This feature exists in high-end NAS offerings, but until now it did not exist in midtier NAS offerings.

"We're talking the value proposition of the high-end NAS space and bringing it down to the midmarket," says Chuck Hollis, director of product marketing at EMC.

Because data storage is vital, most companies choose to cluster together two NAS servers. This way, if the server or a component of the server fails, the other one takes over.

EMC takes a different approach, equipping each server with two sets of components. If one component fails, the other component takes over, eliminating the need for clustering. "You get two of everything," Hollis says. "If you have a problem, the second one takes over. Instead of failing server to server, it's failing piece to piece."

The benefit, of course, is that a customer only has to buy one NAS server, as opposed to two. "We're saying buy one of ours instead of two of theirs," Hollis explains. "Customers get high availability in a redundant sense and don't have to pay more."

EMC's new offering gets high marks from Arum Taneja, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group. "From one box, you get the benefits of two boxes," he says. "As an example, Network Appliances is getting the same functionality out of two boxes clustered together what they call an 840C -- as EMC is get ting out of one box. That is impressive."

The ability to perform the functions of two NAS servers brings up the question of pricing. "Net Apps will say they're much cheaper, but at the high end, one of theirs is as much as one of ours," Hollis says.

Taneja shared the sentiment when asked about the price performance of IP 4700. "EMC has never been known as inexpensive, but in this case they're bringing a very price-competitive product to the market," he says.

With the addition of IP 4700, EMC can now offer its customers an EMC alternative to compete against the midtier NAS offerings that Network Appliance has been successfully selling lately. Taneja, for one, thinks EMC is well-positioned to become a major mid-market NAS player. "I think this [IP 4700] is a barnburner," he says. "It's going to give Net Apps a run for their money."

For EMC, the move was made possible by its acquisition of Data General. The acquisition gave EMC the tools and architecture necessary to enter the midtier space, a capability that did not exist before.

"The acquisition put them in a space that they wouldn't have been able to play in," Taneja says. "However, I am very surprised that they were able to make this move as quickly as they were."

In addition to Clariion IP 4700, EMC made two other NAS announcements. A new software offering called EMC SnapView/IP provides multiple, independent point-in-time copies of the active IP 4700 file system to shorten backup and recovery windows, generate point-in-time analysis and reporting, and speed nondisruptive application testing and deployment.

The other offering, EMC Celerra SE File Server, combines the advantages of the Celerra File Server and the Symmetrix Enterprise Storage System to deliver an entry-level NAS configuration. It includes all the high-end attributes of the Celerra File Server program, can scale to 1.1 TB of internal capacity, and is available in two preconfigured models.

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