EMC Corp. Thursday announced its lowest-priced NAS gateway device targeted at enterprise remote office data back-up and recovery.
The Windows-based NetWin 110 has a starting list price of US$6,100 and is the first such device to be sold exclusively through EMC distributors.
Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass., said EMC’s latest product could allow enterprises to install hundreds or thousands of gateway NAS, or network-attached storage, devices to mirror data back to a central data centre over Ethernet and centrally manage operations.
“It’s something these large organizations are well equipped to do,” Asaro said.
While the NetWin 110 is small, it has many of the functions normally found in higher-end products, such as storage monitoring and alerting capabilities and automatic storage provisioning. Also, the Windows Storage Server 2003-based product includes features such as Volume Shadow Copy Service and Virtual Disk Service.
EMC said the NetWin 110 will be made available in direct-attached and gateway configurations and will come with trial copies of its Legato division’s RepliStor data protection software. Licenses for working models of RepliStor software will start at US$1,500.
Steve Spieler, systems engineer at Wells’ Dairy Inc. in La Mars, Iowa, said he recently purchased two NetWin 200 gateways, the NetWin 110’s predecessor, based on price, ease of use and functionality.
Wells’ Dairy, which has 2,500 employees and sells products from ice cream to dairy novelties under the brand name BlueBunny, has six remote offices — but many more sales representatives who work from home using Windows. Spieler said he wants to replicate data from all the remote locations back to his NetWin 200, which will then mirror to a secondary data center with another NetWin 200.
“It’s just the idea of putting the (Legato) RepliStor product in some of those branch offices will alleviate backing up those machines so that we won’t need nontech people swapping tapes out,” Spieler said. “That way, if the server goes down, that data is here and we can use our tape library to recover it.”
EMC said the NetWin 110 can use the Clariion CX300, CX500 and CX700 midrange disk arrays for storage, significantly boosting the cost. EMC’s Clariion storage arrays serve as the back ends for the NetWin 110 NAS gateway device, with the CX300 going for US$31,875. The CX500 sells for US$66,875, and the CX700 goes for US$121,875. All three have 584GB of usable storage.
For his NetWin 200, Spieler purchased a CX300 array.
Tom Joyce, senior director of NAS product marketing, said the NetWin 110’s biggest play will be in the high-volume market of consolidating direct-attached storage systems in the remote office, eliminating the need to change out back-up tapes onsite.
“The NetWin 110 is actually customer-installable,” he said. “That brings us into an entirely new territory.”
