Gateway aims at Dell, HP with new storage products

Gateway Inc. plans to release two storage products next week as the company tries to break into the market for enterprise hardware, a Gateway executive said Tuesday

Gateway believes that customers are paying too much for storage capacity, and thinks its products can reduce storage costs while providing customers with the latest technology, said Scott Weinbrandt, general manager for the systems and networking product group.

The Poway, California, company will release the Gateway 850 SCSI (small computer systems interface) JBOD (just a bunch of disks) subsystem and the Gateway 820 LTO (linear tape-open) Autoloader next Tuesday.

“We want to do the same thing that Dell did to servers in the storage market,” said Weinbrandt, who came to Gateway from Dell Inc.

Gateway has sold storage products before, but the new products represent a fresh start in the market, Weinbrandt said in an interview Tuesday. As part of its latest strategy to reinvent the company amid a decline in sales of PCs, Gateway is trying to create revenue among business customers at the same time it increases the company’s focus on consumer electronics products.

To be taken seriously in the enterprise market, Gateway needs to offer its customers storage products alongside servers and PCs, said Brian Babineau, an analyst with Enterprise Storage Group Inc. in Milford, Massachusetts. Companies want to have “one throat to choke” when buying IT hardware, he said.

The Gateway 850 is a 2U (3.5 inch) rack-optimized unit that can be used in either a SAN (storage area network) or NAS (network-attached storage) environment. It comes with three 36G-byte hard drives, but can scale up to 12 hard drives with 1.7T bytes of storage capability, Weinbrandt said.

Customers can turn the 850 into a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) system with a RAID controller from LSI Logic Corp. sold by Gateway. The 850 starts at $2,999 with the three 36G-byte hard drives, and costs about $12,000 for the 1.7T byte configuration, Weinbrandt said.

The Gateway 820 is a tape drive for backing up corporate data. It has the capacity to store up to 800G bytes of uncompressed data on a drive manufactured for Gateway by Seagate Technology LLC, Weinbrandt said. It will cost $5,799 in a base configuration with 100G bytes of storage capacity for uncompressed data, and a software package from Veritas Software Corp.

Gateway’s pricing is competitive against the other players in the low-end storage market, such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., and Storage Technology Corp., Babineau said. But pricing alone won’t make up for the fact that Gateway does not have the track record in the enterprise that its competition does, he said.

“Gateway is known as a individual or home market vendor. They don’t have the credibility that Dell would have in this area,” Babineau said.

In other server news, Gateway will update its dual-processor 960X server with a redundant power supply on Thursday, Weinbrandt said.