Storage vendors make value plays

With the economy struggling at best vendors are flooding myinbox with products that promise to deliver Peter Luger's or Ruth's Chrisquality at Sizzler, or at least Outback Steakhouse, prices.  Since I've never, alright never except for duringthe Y2K lunacy, had the kind of carte blanche some of my Wall Street compatriotshad until the recent unpleasantness I've always looked to get the most bang formy buck.

The first interesting value play to cross my inbox was Dell'sannouncement of the Equallogic PS4000 line. Like their existing PS6000 it's a16 drive SAS or SATA chassis with iSCSI controllers that support snapshots,thin provisioning, replication and Equallogic's secret sauce of ease of use andthe ability to combine multiple arrays into a group that is administered andaccessed as one system. The kicker is you can pick up a PS4000 for just$10,000.

So what did Dell do to make the PS4000 affordable? Firstthey offered a stripped down version with 8 250GB drives and just onecontroller.  Then theyput a few limitations in the firmware build enabling 2 rather than 4 gigE portsper controller, limiting snapshots to 128 per volume and most significantlylimiting the number of PS4000s in a group to 2. 

You can still mix and match Equallogic arrays from the original PS100Eto the 48 drive PS6500 or SSD PS6000S in groups with the 4000 you just can'tput more than 2 4000s in a group. 

Next came Fujitsu's DX60 midrange array that's startingprice is under $6000.  Now that's asingle controller model and the DX60 doesn't have sexy features like thinprovisioning at the moment but $6000 for a solid FC, iSCSI or SAS attachedarray is a better deal than you'll get on a CX4 or FAS.
The DX60 is also the first array I've seen that uses flashto backup its cache in the event of a power loss.  Rather than the usual battery and hopingpower's back before the battery's dead, which can be pretty quick on a 4 or 5year old battery, the DX60 and it's DX80 bigger brother, have a capacitor largeenough to keep the RAM cache going and copy it to flash.

Then I saw CA's announcement that ArcServe includes deduplication.I didn't think much of it untill I realized that CA was including dedupe inthe core product not selling it on a capacity basis like the other backupsoftware vendors that have included dedupe over the past few months.

The exception that proves the rule is the kerfuffle that croppedup when VMware noticed that Veeam Software's Veeam Backup supported the freeversion of VMware ESXi as well as the paid version.  They forced Veeam to remove the supportclaiming Veeam Backup uses an unpublished API and that they had to take it offthe market to protect the users.  Someonemore cynical than I could look at that and say they were making sure the free versionof ESXi didn't cannibalize VMware Essentials and paid ESX license sales.

Money's tight and vendors that boost their value will getmore business now and customer loyalty in the long run.