IBM Offers Hardware for High-End NAS Apps

Computerworld - IBM last week announced its first enterprise-class gateway for network-attached storage on Windows, Unix and Linux servers, putting it in direct competition with Network Appliance Inc., EMC Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co.

The rollout is part of an effort by IBM to catch up to those vendors in selling high-end NAS devices, including gateways that let IT managers store data from file servers on storage-area networks.

Last July, IBM nixed its TotalStorage NAS 100 and 200 devices, which were self-contained file servers, in order to focus on higher-end products . That move left the company with the NAS Gateway 300, a Windows-based midrange system that includes a two-processor NAS head and supports up to 22TB of storage.

In comparison, the new NAS Gateway 500 is based on IBM's Power4 processor and AIX operating system. The device can be configured with up to four CPUs and scales to a storage capacity of 224TB, IBM said.

"Customers have been asking us for a more enterprise-class product," said David Vaughn, IBM's manager of gateway products. Using the Common Internet File System protocol for Windows, the NAS Gateway 500 can transfer files one and a half times faster than the 300, he said. With the Network File System protocol used on Unix and Linux machines, the new device is six times faster, he added.

Keith Stevens, a systems administrator at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Cardiovascular Bioinformatics and Modeling in Baltimore, said he's eyeing a NAS Gateway 500 as a relatively inexpensive way to expand his storage capacity.

Stevens is shopping for a replacement for his IBM FAStT500 disk array because the center has maxxed out that device's 7TB capacity. He's also considering a FAStT900 and IBM's Fibre Channel-based Shark array, which both offer 35TB.

But Stevens said he experienced sticker shock with the two arrays. The FAStT900 would cost Johns Hopkins $900,000, and it would take $1.5 million to buy the Shark device, formally known as the Enterprise Storage Server.

Stevens likes the idea of being able to buy a NAS gateway for less than $100,000 as an alternative. "I'm definitely interested in sharing file systems across our network," he said. "We just need something with pretty decent performance."

Pricing starts at $67,000 on the NAS Gateway 500. The device can use either Shark or the FAStT line for back-end storage, and IBM said it also can work with rival disk arrays if it's configured with the company's SAN Volume Controller virtualization software.

"IBM has never been particularly successful at doing NAS, but this is a new ball game," said Mike Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo. "They didn't succeed the first time out. Those devices just didn't have the horsepower."