SNW - Users see commodity storage as blessing, curse

02.11.2006
Small to midsize companies can expect to see a significant drop in storage hardware costs over the next year as big name vendors such as Dell Inc. and Intel Corp. produce standardized equipmen in an effort to further commoditize the industry.

Dell announced at Storage Networking World this week that it is now reselling EMC's midrange Clariion Fibre Channel/iSCSI arrays and will offer a 10Gbit/sec Ethernet switch beginning next month in conjunction with the arrays in order to help companies backup stranded servers.

Both Dell and Intel representatives said they are trying to take the guess work out of deploying storage.

Jim Ward, a storage administrator with Reston, Va.-based SLM Corp. -- better known as Sallie Mae -- said his company is currently evaluating iSCSI technology to determine where "it might fit" in his infrastructure -- "as long as it plays well with everything else in our infrastructure," he said.

Praveen Asthana, director of Storage at Dell, said his company is rebranding EMC's CX3-20 and CX3-40 Clariion arrays that were released in the spring, which offer either Fibre Channel connectivity or a mix of Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity to application servers. "The thing we're trying to do at Dell is change the economics of storage," Asthana said.

Last year, Dell began reselling EMC's AX150i entry-level storage array, which can also be configured for Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Since introducing that array, Asthana said sales of iSCSI models have far outpaced those of Fibre Channel. The CX3-20, which scales to 59TB, has a starting price of about US$53,000 retail.