EMC, Dell launch Piranha SAN

Computerworld - EMC Corp. and Dell Inc. today announced their lowest-priced array that can be preconfigured as a storage-area network (SAN) with backup and management software. EMC CEO Joe Tucci painted the market for the product, called Piranha, with a broad brush, saying it will span everything from small businesses to distributed enterprises.
At $5,999, the new AX100 is the lowest-priced array EMC has offered. It's part of the Clariion series that uses Serial Advanced Technology Attachment disk. Dell also announced it would sell EMC's Legato division's replication, backup and recovery software, RepliStor and NetWorker, separately for the AX100.
The AX100 starts with 480GB capacity and can be bundled with Brocade Communication System's new 3250 eight-port switch, Q-Logic Corp.'s SLA200 host bus adapter for $9,999, according to Mike Wytenus, senior director of EMC's Clariion platforms.
Dell's chief operating officer, Kevin Rollins, said customers who aren't IT professionals can set up the AX100 and operate it in just four steps that will take less than one hour.
Asked during a news conference today whether Dell and EMC are looking to trigger a price war in networked storage, Rollins replied, "It wouldn't be the worst thing to happen. We fully expect this product to change the storage industry by increasing the number of customers able to afford and use networked storage."
Tucci sniped at his market competition, saying that other vendors see Serial ATA disk drives only as secondary storage, while "this is the real McCoy. This is going to be primary storage for this market. It's got the availability and the performance to meet all the requirements for that market."
John McArthur, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said the AX100 puts EMC in a position to compete for market share against internal storage vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Dell itself.
"Right now, Dell takes them to a space they were having challenges getting to. Over time, it could end up in some competition between them," McArthur said.
Rollins described the collaboration with EMC on the AX100 array as being closer "than any other product in our portfolio."
The AX100 scales from 480GB to 3TB and has enterprise-class features such as dual redundant controllers, dual 2GB/sec. Fibre Channel I/O ports on each controller, path fail-over and snapshot capability. The AX100 also supports high-availability features such as RAID 5, hot-swappable drives, dual power supplies and fans.

The 2.5-in.-high array comes with 12 Serial ATA drives in either 160GB or 250GB capacities and can host up to eight servers in a SAN, networked-attached storage or direct-attached storage configuration. The AX100 supports the