Network Appliance adds to midrange line

23.05.2005
Von Bob Francis

Network Appliance Inc. Monday released two new midrange products aimed at reducing storage costs and increasing storage utilization rates.

The new products are the FAS3020 and the FAS3050, new midrange storage systems, a new SATA option for primary storage applications, and the V3020 and V3050, two new V-Series virtualization engines.

All the new products use Network Appliance"s Data ONTAP 7G software, which company officials say is a primary reason the new products reduce storage costs and increase storage utilization rates.

"Our customers tell us that data storage consumes 30 percent to 50 percent of their IT infrastructure budgets, and that data growth presents a huge management challenge," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of products and partners at Network Appliance. "We listened and designed the modular and scalable FAS3000 series and the V3000 systems to reduce overall complexity, increase performance, and simplify data management. Additionally, we are achieving an industry milestone by enabling economical, high-density SATA disk drives for primary storage applications -- without sacrificing data integrity and safety," he said.

The new FAS3000 series doubles the price/performance ratio and supports more users per system than the company"s previous systems, company officials said. The new series scales to 84TB of capacity.

Network Appliance officials said the new SATA storage option cuts the storage cost per megabyte significantly. "We also offer some safeguards for the SATA drives using RAID-DP technology," said Suresh Vasudevan, vice president of product marketing at Network Appliance. "This offers better data protection than traditional RAID-1 or disk mirroring," he said.

The V3020 and V3050 systems increase the virtualization capabilities of Network Appliance Data ONTAP 7G software to include additional third-party storage products from Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. The new FAS3020 and FAS3050 systems and the new SATA storage option are available immediately. The new V3020 and V3050 systems will be available in June.