Clariion, the storage division of Data General Corp, is extending its end-to-end Fibre Channel approach with its FC5300 disk array aimed at the SME market. Joel Schwarz, senior vice president and general manager of the Southborough, Massachusetts-based company said that the new product is also suitable for organizations such as banks that want storage in branch offices to be entirely compatible with what they have at head office.
The FC5300 is pitched at an aggressively low price point of 18 cents per megabyte, a feat which was achieved by stripping out all but the bare essentials of Clariion’s larger offerings, placing it well to compete against offerings from Compaq and low-end Storage Networks, Schwarz argues.
It costs just over half the price of the next machine up in the Clariion range, the 5700, and also has the advantage of being easily upgradable as the user site’s requirements increase. It has the same enclosures and disks, Schwarz explained. The list price of the smallest 5300 array is about $20,000, with a 30-drive, high-end version retailing about $200,000.
