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When it comes to SANs, it looks as if the middle of the road is the place to be.
Major SAN vendors report burgeoning midrange sales, as an expanding pool of medium- to large-sized companies look to network their storage. These customers are drawn to modular designs, software advances, and the expansion of iSCSI as an alternative to Fibre Channel.
Midrange fever is manifest in a rash of recent news. In the last week or so alone, we've seen EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) make midrange announcements:
EMC rolled out iSCSI capability for its Clariion midrange systems. Previously, EMC offered native iSCSI only for its high-end Symmetrix. EMC will likely sell iSCSI mostly on its low-end AX100i at first, but it is also making it available in the midrange CX300i and CX500i (see EMC Mounts iSCSI Blitz).
While it made no formal announcement, HP has new disaster-recovery software for its EVA SANs, including the EVA 3000 and 5000, that allows automatic failover for applications on the server cluster and storage. The software adds synchronous and asynchronous replication and remote mirroring to EVA systems.
IBM added an upgraded 146-Gbyte Fibre Channel drive to the DS4000 system it gets through an OEM deal with Engenio Information Technologies Inc. (see IBM Upgrades Tape, Disk, Software). The new drives spin at 15,000 rpm, up from the 10,000rpm spindle speed of previous 146-Gbyte drives. IBM also offers optional 300-Gbyte, 10,000rpm drives, increasing the maximum capacity of the DS4000 to 67 Tbytes.