NetApp unveils hybrid array to compete with EMC

07.11.2006
Network Appliance Inc. announced Monday a new storage array model that is intended to compete more directly with the higher end of EMC Corp.'s midrange arrays.

The Fabric Attached Storage (FAS) 3070 model is at the "top of the midrange," according to Rich Clifton, vice president and general manager of the network storage business unit at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. The array comes in two versions, the FAS3070, and the V3070, which contains a storage processor that users can put in front of other vendors' storage to virtualize it, Clifton said. They can be used for either network-attached storage or a storage-area networks, he said.

Michael Israel, senior vice president of information services at Six Flags Inc., a New York-based theme park company, is already using NetApp FAS3020 and FAS3050 systems and plans to migrate to the FAS3070. The company expects to add more disaster recovery to its environment because the devices have more capacity and faster processing. Eventually, each park will have an FAS3050, with six FAS3070s in the data center in Dallas that will receive data from the parks on a daily basis, Israel said.

NetApp intends to use the array to compete more directly with EMC and its Clariion CX3-80 array, which also supports both Fibre Channel and iSCSI. The array, which is in between NetApp's FAS3050 and FAS6030 models, offers scalability to 252TB and support for unified storage with both 4Gbit Fibre Channel and 10Gbit Ethernet iSCSI connectivity, the company said.

The company also said it had enhanced its manageability software offerings with its new Protection Manager, a backup and replication tool, and Command Central Storage, a storage resource management and policy management product.

Stephanie Balaouras, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that NetApp offered an advantage over EMC by having a single product line. "The pendulum is swinging from distributed to centralized," she said.