EMC's Newest NAS Appliance Offers Clariion Connectivity

The NetWin 110, based on the latest version of Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003, gives NAS connectivity to EMC's Clariion arrays, said Tom Joyce, senior director of NAS product marketing.

That connectivity will include the company's upcoming low-cost array, code-named Piranha, which EMC executives have hinted will be released shortly with a list price of less than $10,000, according to industry sources.

EMC's announcement precedes those of Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which are expected to unveil their own NAS appliances based on the latest feature pack of Storage Server 2003.

The NetWin 110 is expected to be a channel-only product, Joyce said. "We are looking for ways to become a better partner for VARs."

The new appliance also signifies a continued strong relationship between EMC and Microsoft, one that was tested by EMC's acquisition earlier this year of VMware, a developer of server virtualization software. Microsoft is expected to unveil its own server virtualization software this summer.

The NetWin 110 comes in a 1U rack-mount enclosure, and includes a single 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1 Gbyte of DDR memory. It attaches to a Clariion array to allow data stored on the Clariion to be served in file format instead of in a SAN's block format. It is expected to ship in June with a list price of $6,100.

Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Warrensville Heights, Ohio-based solution provider, said the NetWin 110 should put EMC in a good position in the NAS space.

The NetWin 110 is one way to talk to customers about flexibility and options for their Clariion arrays, he said. "They can utilize disk a couple of different ways for NAS and RAID."