The StorEdge 3310 NAS machine launched this week is a low-end device made by Dot Hill Systems Corp, which carries a starting list price of $18,995 and has a maximum capacity of 2.7TB over 36-off 73GB drives. The machine will talk to SANs or servers using between four and eight Fibre Channel ports.

Although Sun acknowledged that Dot Hill is making the 3310, it insisted that it has made its own mark on the array. I wouldn’t categorize it as Dot Hill machine, because we’ve added a whole pile of software, said Mark Canepa, executive vice president of Sun’s networked storage group. Canepas said that software includes drivers, and links into Sun’s existing fault management and load management tools.

The rack-mounted device has been launched with the channel very much in mind, Canepa said, and is Sun’s first NAS box. Over the last few years we’ve been building in the SAN and Fibre Channel space. Basically it’s a matter of prioritization, he said.

Canepas declined to say what other NAS products Sun is planning to launch, but he appeared to hint that if there are any they will be low-end machines. Simplicity and ease of use are important. We’ve got to approach the market carefully, he said.

Last year Sun acquired Pirus Networks Inc, a start-up supplier of a storage device which among other things can act as a NAS head, allowing file-based access data to storage held on a storage array or in a SAN which is also holding block-level data. We don’t think of NAS as a standalone storage device, we think of it as a feature of storage, Canepa said.

The StorEdge 3510 array also launched this week by Sun is an entry-level DAS or SAN device, which Canepa claims is cheaper, easier to use and denser than the entry-level Clariion CX200 array being made for EMC Corp by Dell Computer Corp, and further up the range, the Clariion CX400.

Unlike the Clarrion, the 3510 is not offered with any optional remote replication software, but only has some snapshot abilities. The 3510 carries a starting list price of $22,995, and offers a capacity of up to 5.3TB over 36-off 146GB drives managed by one or two controllers. In the past Sun has limited the third-party servers which its storage arrays have been qualified to work with. This week it said it has qualified the 3510 for use with Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris servers.

Source: Computerwire