EMC, IBM make NAS push

EMC hopes to shake up the NAS market this week when it announces a low-priced offering that delves into territory staked out by NAS pioneer Network Appliance.

The storage titan’s move into the NAS fray follows a pre-emptive strike IBM made last week, when it announced its lower-end TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 system.

Both companies are arming their NAS systems with features and price points that should appeal to midsize companies and department-level units. 

EMC this week will detail its NS500, a lower-cost NAS system aimed at commercial and enterprise environments, and will announced its NS704G and NS500G, two gateway products designed for NAS and SAN integration. The systems include software and management features from the company’s Celerra management software, as well as improved Windows integration and support for iSCSI (Internet SCSI). The systems can scale to as much as 208TB.

EMC’s support of iSCSI will drive down customers’ TCO by streamlining SAN infrastructure and simplifying management, said Tony Asaro, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“It is important that EMC is supporting iSCSI.  This allows customers to use NAS for file sharing and iSCSI for exchange and database storage using the same network infrastructure,” Asaro said.

EMC is not the only company offering new NAS products at this price point. IBM, for its part, reconfigured the TotalStorage NAS Gateway 500 with a single processor to provide a low-cost entry for NAS customers. Unveiled last week, Big Blue’s midmarket NAS also provides enhanced Windows integration.

“These systems offer the same management features and functionality; we’ve just removed some components the entry-level market doesn’t require,” said David Vaughn, worldwide product manager for NAS at IBM. NAS Gateway 500 starts at just more than $30,000. 

These lower-cost NAS products are designed for the midsize-business market, where IT dollars are hard to come by, said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner at Data Mobility Group. 

“They have to be easy to use, as well as affordable. That’s one reason you’re seeing more Windows elements in the products,” McAdam said.

Whereas high-end vendors such as IBM and EMC have been moving down toward the small- and midsize-business and departmental markets, NAS heavyweight Network Appliance has been moving up the enterprise ladder. In May, the company rolled out its FAS920 and FAS920c storage systems with support not just for iSCSI but also for the higher-end Fibre Channel.

“It’s a compliment that other companies have been coming into our space,” said Keith Brown, director of technology at Network Appliance. “For a long time, they viewed NAS as an annoyance, but now they can’t ignore it. That validates our position.”

As companies have begun to move storage off servers and instead attach it directly to networks, NAS systems have become increasingly popular. The market for NAS is growing at approximately a 9 percent compound annual growth rate, according to Gartner Group. EMC said its NAS revenue for the second quarter increased 40 percent over that of the same quarter last year.

“We’re seeing a growing percentage of our customers buying NAS,” said Tom Joyce, senior director of NAS at EMC. “There’s no question about the trend.”