IBM Debuts Low-End SANs

IBM thinks storage suppliers have been misreading the signals from small enterprises, and its latest SAN is aimed at correcting the problem.

"A lot of companies do a 'bait and switch' with smaller companies, introducing half-sized products at half price, then trying to sell them larger systems," says Harold Pike, IBM worldwide product marketing manager for the DS4000 series of midrange storage arrays. "These single-controller systems aren't selling."

Just because a company is small and price-conscious doesn't mean it's storage-ignorant, Pike insists. "Companies that are small actually know storage well."

To hear Pike tell it, SMBs or SMEs haven't been getting their fair share from SAN makers, who assume these customers simply get on the Web and buy the cheapest system they can find. But IBM has learned its lesson, he says. It is replacing the low-end of its DS4000 midrange SANs with a version that matches enterprise functions but is priced for smaller firms.

The DS4200 Express Model, based on LSI gear, is a standard dual-controller SATA storage array supporting 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel at capacities of up to 56 Tbytes. Its predecessor, the DS4100, featured one controller with an optional dual controller and supported 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel at capacities to 44 Tbytes with an expansion unit. Announced today, the DS4200 Express will be generally available August 25.The linchpin in IBM's DS4200 strategy is the price, which is geared to put the new product up against HP's MSA1500 and Dell/EMC's AX150 -- well, sort of.

According to Pike, pricing for the base DS4200 will be $11,474; disk drives will be "less than $900 apiece," and an entire system will cost roughly $20,000. The warranty is a three- to five-year arrangement for parts, labor, and software, with next-business-day service guaranteed.

On the downside, premium features are worthy of the name: Flash copy and volume copy cost $6,750 individually or $13,500 together; enhanced remote mirroring costs another $20,250.

In comparison, the HP MSA1500 starts at about $7,995 and the Dell/EMC AX150 at $5,600. However, these products are both 2-Gbit/s systems. The AX150 maxes out at 6 Tbytes and has no expansion units; the MSA1500 holds 48 Tbytes with an expansion unit. And while these systems may cost less than IBM's to start out with, their options and premium features are also priced separately, just like IBM's.

One thing: IBM's system does not yet support iSCSI, though the company is "considering it," according to a spokesperson. EMC and HP, in constrast, support either FC or iSCSI in their units.In other words, the devil, in the case of these lower-end midrange systems, is in the details. IBM's Pike is aware of this, and he plugs another strategy: expanded warranty terms. The basic DS4200 comes with a three-year warranty on the entire system, software, parts, and labor. HP's MSA1500 is warranted for three years for parts only -- the labor warranty is valid for one year. EMC's AX150 carries a one-year warranty.

IBM's approach with its new DS4200 doesn't surprise at least one analyst. "Contacts indicate IBM remains aggressive in storage through solution bundling and pricing tactics," writes Thomas Curlin of RBC Capital Markets in a note today.

"[I]t does appear that IBM is aggressively going after the SMB market," writes analyst Dianne McAdam of The Clipper Group consultancy in an email. She says IBM's three-year warranty for features like snapshots, volume replication, and volume mirroring is an interesting distinction from other vendors' wares. "And, of course, disk drives keep getting larger and larger in capacity and disk prices are dropping. So the addition of large capacity 500 GB SATA drives allows IBM to hold the line on price."

It remains to be proven whether SMBs really want a premium-style midrange SAN, as IBM thinks. Further, SMB buyers now have a slew of other companies to help them with their storage problems, ones that use clustered NAS and multi-tiered disks.

Pike says no IBM customers are willing to go on record with their reactions to the new unit yet. Until they do, and until sales are well underway, it's going to be hard to gauge the impact of IBM's new SMB thinking.Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch