Dell Computer Corp continued its hungry expansion into the storage arena today with the announcement of three new products to address the mid-range and high-end market. Dell says the three products; the PowerVault 200S, the PowerEdge Perc 2 controller and the PowerVault 130T tape library, round out its portfolio of storage devices and position the company as a major player in the field. We’ve always sold storage devices but up till now they’ve mostly been internal, said Bruce Kornfeld, this announcement marks the first time we’ve really moved into offering external devices, and that makes us a serious contender in this space. The products will join Dell’s existing PowerVault family, which currently consists of one high-end RAID product, the 650F, that the company began sourcing from Data General Corp’s Clariion storage arm in September (CI No 3,385). It was said to have toyed with the notion of buying the unit outright at one point. With the new products, Dell is trying to address the mid-range workgroup/departmental space, Kornfeld said. The PowerVault 200S offers up to eight external 7,200rpm or 10,000 rpm Ultra 2 SCSI hard drives, capable of moving data at 80 Megabytes per second. Up to four disks can be configured in a single array. The product includes a number of high availability features such as redundant power supplies and hot pluggable fans and disk drives. Prices start at $3,000, for a single hard drive, and increase to $17,000 for 8 drives. Dell said it partnered with EuroLogic on the design process. The Perc 2 RAID controller is positioned as a companion product to the 200S and offers twice the data transfer speed of Dell’s existing RAID product. Up to four 200S boxes can connect to one Perc 2. It is a 64-bit PCI card with 64MB of cache, expandable to 128MB and costs $1,899. It will be sold as an option to Dell’s PowerEdge enterprise servers. Both the 200S and Perc 2 are resold through an OEM agreement with Adaptec Inc. While both products are primarily aimed at the midrange market, the Powervault 130T tape library, which Dell OEMs from StorageTech, is for larger enterprises. It can hold up to 30 tape cartridges and up to four DLT 4000 or DLT 7000 tape drives, providing up to 2 terabytes of compressed data. It costs $17,799 with one tape drive. Dell also said its existing product, the 650F, would now be available with 18 gigabyte disk drives, as opposed to the previous nine. The company also announced the PowerEdge 4300; a new midrange, departmental server. Costing $44,943, the box is just 7 inches high and features two Pentium II processors. The new products come just a month after Dell announced an OEM agreement with Network Appliance Inc, under which Dell will bring NetApp’s storage devices to the Windows NT and Windows 2000 market (CI No 3,533). Kornfeld said Dell wasn’t yet reporting the unit shipments of its storage equipment, although he added that sales of the high-end 650F product have already exceeded our expectations.
