NetApp Does the Storage Limbo

Network Appliance has taken the storage industry's pursuit of small and mid-sized businesses to new lows with a $3,000 storage appliance. NetApp bills the new StoreVault S300 as an "all-in-one storage solution for small and medium businesses" (not to be confused with HP's All-in-One SMB storage systems).

Sajai Krishnan, general manager of NetApp's StoreVault Division, said the StoreVault S300 offers security, scalability, data protection and simplified management otherwise unavailable at that price point. The S300 gives small businesses "the same technology that Citibank could have, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for $3,000," he said.

Krishnan said small business owners could get storage for less from the likes of Buffalo Technology or Seagate, "but if you truly value your data, then you need to look at something more."

"The price point of the S300 will give smaller businesses access to technology that was previously out of their reach," agreed Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO.

Krishnan also emphasized the S300's ease of installation and management, dubbing it "zero to iSCSI or NAS in seven minutes." The larger S500 offers Fibre Channel connectivity and greater capacity and performance, starting at $5,500.

The S300 is aimed at IT generalists in smaller companies that need 1 to 3TB of data storage and have five to 15 servers in a Windows environment, and remote and branch offices of large organizations are another target market.

The S300 replicates to NetApp FAS enterprise solutions, allowing units to be linked into data centers. StoreVault Manager 3.0 also provides additional software licensing and management, including SnapManager for Exchange StoreVault Edition to manage and secure Exchange databases.

The StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture includes high-performance snapshot copies. RAID-DP provides protection against dual concurrent drive failures, and FlexVol lets users defer capacity purchases. StoreVault replication software also copies NAS and SAN data to a remote StoreVault site for disaster recovery and read-only remote publication.

Adapted from Enterprisestorageforum.com.