HP, Dell Serve Up Small-Biz Storage

Both Hewlett-Packard and Dell have announced new storage products aimed at making network-centric storage more attractive to the small- and medium-size business marketplace.

Dell Grows Storage

Dell on Monday began shipping a replacement for its 1U (1.76-inch) rack-mounted PowerVault 725N network-attached storage server, called the 745N. In addition to a faster processor speed, the 745N has a capacity of 4 terabytes of SCSI attached storage--four times the limit of the 725--and includes snapshot software that allows customers to easily back up and restore the system.

The 745N runs Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003, and is available with between 160GB and 4 terabytes of storage, and with Celeron or Pentium 4 processors ranging up to 3.2 GHz.

HP's Entry

Also on Monday, HP announced plans to widen its networked storage offerings for small- and medium-size businesses. "We're seeing explosive growth in data. This is impacting small businesses as well," said Kyle Fitze, the director of product marketing for online storage with HP. "With these new products and technologies, we can finally deliver that efficiency of storage management and deployment to a new class of customers," he said.

By July of this year, HP plans to begin shipping a new member of its Modular Smart Array line of networked storage arrays for small- and medium-size businesses that will be based on the Serial ATA interconnect. Serial ATA works with inexpensive drives but still allows users to "hot plug" new drives without turning off the array. It also has an architecture that enables it to work well with large pools of data storage, according to Fitze. "We thought that this technology could be leveraged very nicely to an entry-level SAN [storage area network] environment," he said.

If HP can help users deploy easy-to-use, inexpensive SAN arrays using Serial ATA, it might have some success selling to the small- and medium-size business market, said John McArthur, an analyst with research firm IDC. To date, small- and medium-size businesses have been slow to adopt SANs because of the high cost of the Fibre Channel drives most commonly used by SANs, he said.

More to Come

Also in the works is a new HP StorageWorks B-series line of SAN switches, based on 8-port and 16-port Fibre Channel switches from Brocade Communications Systems, as well as a tape autoloader, capable of storing six 72GB data cartridges, called the DAT 72x6.

The DAT 72x6 will be available later this month, starting at $2799. When the B-series switches begin shipping in April, an 8-port model will cost $5000. Customers will pay $12,500 for a 16-port model.

Fitze declined to reveal details on HPs upcoming Serial ATA array.