CDW Gets EMC’s Iomega Network Storage Array Appliance First

Iomega, EMC‘s
small and medium business storage arm, will be launching a new Network Storage
array rack-mount appliance next week that will significantly expand its market
reach.

Jay Krone, Iomega’s GM of network solutions, tells Channel Insider that the
Iomega StorCenter ix12-300r Network Storage array will be exclusive to CDW
until mid-June, when the product will be released to the rest of the company’s U.S.
channel partners, including EMC Velocity partners.

What’s exciting about the announcement is that it targets customers with 100 to
250 users, which raises Iomega’s total addressable market at the top end and
EMC’s TAM at the low end. IDC puts the 100- to 500-employee market at 700,000
globally.

"Iomega is doing very well in the network-attached storage market,” says
Krone. “We’re No. 3 in the market and the fastest-growing network storage
provider in our space." The market is continuing to grow, and the company
is also taking market share, says Krone. The objective with the ix12-300r was
to target a space that was incremental to both companies.

Starting at under $5,000, the array is expandable up to 12 drives and 24TB
(under $10,000) in a two-rack unit (2U) form factor. The company says it is
ideal for production file (NAS) and block (SAN) data storage, backup to disk
(B2D) of critical business data, shared storage for virtualized environments
including Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 and VMware vSphere, and application-specific
storage such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.  

The StorCenter ix12-300r features new advances in the EMC LifeLine software’s
provisioning and storage management capabilities. The array can be configured
with different levels of RAID support: RAID 5 (preconfigured), RAID 6, RAID 1
and RAID 10 (all with automatic RAID rebuild), as well as JBOD (a single volume
of storage). It supports storage pools, which enables the drives inside the
array to be grouped together by similar size and data protection mechanism.

According to IDC’s Benjamin S. Woo, program vice president of Worldwide Storage
Systems Research, the new array brings advanced enterprise features to small
enterprises that require more data management sophistication than what had
previously been available at the top of Iomega’s NAS offerings, and just below
the EMC Clariion line. He calls it a cohesive product strategy to address
today’s dynamic SMB marketplace.  

This is the first Iomega product to be run through EMC’s interoperability testing
facility to ensure it not only addresses the higher end of the SMB market, but
that it’s also attractive to enterprise customers with branch offices, says
Krone. There are also several specific market segments that will be targeted
initially, including Microsoft Exchange 2010 users and video surveillance
customers. He says they’ve already received Microsoft’s equivalent of the Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Krone says the potential competitors include HP, IBM and Dell at the higher
end, and NetGear at the lower end. However, he believes Iomega will slide under
the higher-end competitors, and provide much better value at the low end.

From a channel perspective, Krone says the new array can open the door to a
number of partners Iomega has never worked with. He sees the volume
distributors as a big opportunity because their customers have tended not to
pick up Iomega products.