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IBM Refreshes NAS Lineup

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) has beefed up its NAS products with more capacity and processing power and plans to spend $100 million on its network storage group over the next year (see IBM Enhances NAS Wares).

In addition, Big Blue has taken the wraps off a midrange storage server, the FAStT 700, concluding a 15-month reseller agreement with Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ).

The move comes a week after Compaq marked the termination of its agreement to resell IBMs high-end Shark storage array with the introduction of its own product into this sector.

The FAStT 700 provides Fibre Channel connectivity that supports data transfer rates of up to 2 Gbit/s, remote copy and flashcopy features, and up to 120,000 cached input/output (I/O) operations per second, according to IBM. These measurements are more than double the performance of the CLARiiON 4700 from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM claims.

The upgraded NAS products include:

  • TotalStorage Network Attached Storage Models 200 and 300, which feature increased storage capacity of up to 400 gigabytes on the 200 and 6.6 terabytes on the 300. The network interface card common to both models now has four rather than one Ethernet port to support greater data protection. And the NAS 300G (Gateway) model now offers additional fault tolerance.
  • TotalStorage IP Storage 200i, which now provides up to double the capacity of older models (3.5 terabytes). This device also offers faster performance with new 1.13Ghz Pentium III processors, providing a 35 percent throughput improvement, IBM says.
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