Gateway Keys Storage Push at Comdex

Looking for elbow room in the already crowded storage market, Gateway used the annual Comdex show in Las Vegas Tuesday as its soapbox to launch a slew of new storage products.

The Poway, Calif.-based company, which held a consumer electronics-oriented media event last week in New York City to allude to the major storage push, unveiled two new devices, systems management software and partnerships with both Hitachi Data Systems and SuSe Linux.

Gateway will have its work cut out if it wants to compete with IBM , HP and EMC, among others. While pumping out products similar to what rival vendors manufactured a few years ago, Gateway has been unveiling new devices at a prodigious clip, and seems confident in its ability to undercut competitors by offering low prices.

The outfit, which is also in the midst of a large consumer electronics push with plasma TVs as the main attraction, unveiled the Gateway 860 network-attached storage (NAS) appliance, the first NAS product from Gateway in more than two years.

It is a serial advanced technology attachment (S-ATA) rackmount device designed to run on Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 and plugs straight into an Ethernet network and can hold up to 1TB of data. The 860 NAS serves as a virtual “shared drive” for all network users and is targeted at small- and medium-sized businesses, government agencies and educational institutions

Accompanying this machine is the Gateway 840 SATA Enclosure, a 2U rackmount appliance that attaches directly to servers. Like the NAS 860, it is based on S-ATA technology, making it less expensive than small computer system interface (SCSI) drives. S-ATA is exploding as a popular alternative to parallel data connection transfer and some vendors, such as Gateway, are positioning it as a less-costly alternative to other transfer technologies.

In other product news, Gateway launched its latest systems management software, Gateway System Manager (GSM) 3.0, which gives IT administrators a tool to manage systems from afar with the Web. Mirroring systems management software from IBM, HP and CA, Gateway’s GSM informs administrators about predictive system failures and provides logs and reports of system changes and problems.

In fact, GSM is standards-based and compatible with all major enterprise consoles, including IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol and HP OpenView. Dell launched its systems management software offering bolstered by Microsoft’s supportlast week.

Gateway has also embarked on a partnership with Hitachi Data Systems, marking the company’s entrance into the storage area network (SAN) arena. Gateway will sell Hitachi’s Thunder 9500 V Series modular storage systems and software to SMB, corporate, education and government accounts in the U.S. and Canada.

Lastly, Gateway Tuesday vowed to sell and support SUSE LINUX across its entire servers line in another example of how Linux is gaining widespread acceptance in the enterprise market as an alternative to Microsoft Windows operating system environments.

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 is now offered with Gateway’s 955, 975, and 995 rackmount servers and its Gateway 960 and 980 tower servers for high-performance computing, while SuSE Standard Server 8 is geared for the “edge” of the network and is now offered with Gateway’s 920, 955, 960, 975 and 980 servers for file/print, web serving, mail, cache, and firewall deployments.

Product pricing: the NAS 860 begins at $3,199 for the 320GB model and comes with four 80GB serial ATA drives, while the 840 SATA Enclosure begins at a base price of $3,949 for the 320GBmodel and $7,199 for the 3TB version and comes standard with three Serial ATA drives. Both devices will ship mid-December, as will the Gateway Systems Manager 3.0, which will be free with every Gateway server and managed storage product.

Adapted from Internetnews.com.

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