For example, Dell Inc. and EMC Corp. are unveiling a jointly developed follow-on offering to their entry-level AX100/AX100i storage-area network system.

Howard Shoobe, senior manager of network-attached and entry storage at Dell, said that 80 percent of the older products' customers were first-time SAN users.

The new AX150/AX150i hardware, scheduled to ship this month for US$5,600, doubles the performance of the earlier model by using the Serial ATA II specification, he said.

IBM will be releasing the Stor-Server EZ Backup Appliances, which come preconfigured with IBM Tivoli management software and are available in disk-to-disk, disk-to-tape and disk-to-disk-to-tape versions. Pricing starts at $5,000.

Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said even users at smaller firms need to connect more of their systems to SANs, because unconnected storage absorbs a lot of management overhead.