EMC Continues Midrange Push

The Celerra NS350, with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and up to 10 Tbytes of capacity, is aimed at the market currently being served by Network Appliances’ FAS270 and 270c NAS products—but with lower pricing and higher performance, said Jim Holley, director of NAS platforms at EMC.

With the release of the NS350, EMC also is adding incentives to its Velocity channel program—including deal registration—to encourage solution providers to pick up the product, Holley said.

The introduction of the NS350 is the latest in a series of moves by EMC to expand beyond its traditional enterprise focus, and comes shortly after the company unveiled a program targeting small businesses.

The NS350 will help bring EMC’s NAS technology to midsize businesses, said Bob Murphy, co-president of Networked Information Systems, a Woburn, Mass.-based solution provider.

“This will absolutely allow them to go down-market,” Murphy said. “But they will never be the low-price leader.”

Murphy said he is seeing signs from EMC that it will continue to push into the SMB space, including the packaging of midrange hardware and software bundles similar to its Insignia small-business packages.

“EMC is an interesting company to watch,” he said. “I’ve been in the channel for 16 years. I’ve worked with Novell and the real channel champs of the day. EMC was the last partner to the dance. It’s interesting to see them leverage the channel.”

EMC this week also unveiled the Celerra NS704, a higher-end version of the Celerra NAS appliance, which features higher performance than the NS350 and scales to 48 Tbytes. Both the NS350 and NS704 are Windows-certified iSCSI appliances. The NS350 is priced at $58,000 with 1 Tbyte of capacity, dual controllers, data replication software and warranty.

The company also introduced Smarts IP Availability Manager, software that discovers and monitors devices attached to the network. Pricing starts at $50,000.