Expanding its storage offerings for small and medium businesses (SMB), as well as “distributed enterprises,” Iomega this week is rolling out a new line of network storage devices designed specifically for those markets.
Iomega’s new StorCenter PX series of storage products is coming out of the gate with three units — two desktop enclosures and one rackmount — all configurable for various needs, according to Iomega officials.
“It’s a high-performance group of products that we haven’t had before,” Marc Tanguay, general manager of Iomega’s network storage products, told InternetNews.com.
One unique aspect is that they include the capability to get the units without any storage at all, with all or some solid state drive (SSD) storage, or with as much as 18 TB of hard disk drive (HDD) storage.
The two desktop units come in four and six-bay configurations, while the rackmount unit comes with four bays.
All three provide advanced data protection features such as support for multiple RAID levels with hot swap drive capabilities. They also provide UPS support, user quotas, device-to-device replication, and certification for most virtualization environments, including VMware’s vSphere 4.0, Citrix XenServer, and Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 Release 2 (R2), the company said in a statement.
“We make it easy to use [the PX series] in the environment that you have so, it’s designed to support virtualization well,” Tanguay said.
Additionally, the PX series was designed to simplify set-up, configuration, and management for SMBs and non-IT personnel.
“You don’t have to be an IT person to do this — we’ve taken advanced features and made them easy to use,” Tanguay added.
Those advanced capabilities include support for Iomega’s Personal Cloud Web-based technology, which it launched in early January.
“By buying two or more of our NAS products, you can remotely backup your onsite data to an alternate location — be it your office, home or some other location — giving consumers and small businesses the ideal disaster recovery plan that’s easy to implement and economical,” Iomega CEO Jonathan Huberman, said in a statement at that time.
Storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) bought out San Diego-based PC industry storage pioneer Iomega three years ago.
This time last year, Iomega announced an initiative to provide more enterprise-like storage capabilities with pricing for SMBs, when it introduced the StorCenter ix12-300r. The StorCenter ix12-300r supports up to 4 TB of storage for less than $5,000.
The new PX series aims to push beyond that.
“The PX series has the same easy-to-use LifeLine operating system and hardware designed and tested by the same team that produces EMC’s enterprise network storage products,” Huberman said in a statement this week.
The new units feature dual Core Intel processors, 2 GB of memory, and dual GbE NICs, the statement said.
Iomega’s new StorCenter px4-300d desktop unit provides four drive bays and as much as 12 TB of storage, while the px6-300d desktop has six bays and will hold up to 18 TB. Empty bays in both models are fitted with a drive carrier that can hold 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch HDD drives, as well as SSDs for performance-intensive applications, the company added.
Meanwhile, the px4-300r rackmount storage array has four bays for use with HDDs or SSDs in a 1U form factor that can hold a total of 12 TB of storage. It is available from configurations with no installed storage to fully populated with HDD and/or SSD drives.
The px4-300r has all of the high availability features of Iomega’s flagship rackmount unit, the StorCenter ix12-300r, including redundant power supplies, the company said.
The StorCenter px4-300d starts at $799 for the diskless model, $1,199.99 for a partially-populated 4 TB model, or up to $2,999 for the fully-populated 12 TB model.
Further, the px6-300d devices start at $1,199.99 with no storage, while the partially-populated 6 TB model costs $1,699.99. A fully populated 18 TB model costs $3,999.
Finally, the rackmount px4-300r storage arrays start at $2,299 for the diskless model and run up to $3,799.99 for the 12 TB configuration. However, it does not support a partially-populated configuration, the company said.