Isn't NetApp risking the loss of some potential NAS business at the low end? Not at all, Santora says. The price/performance differential between
NearStore and the vendor's existing NAS filers is such that NearStore would not be as
attractive to use as a primary storage box, he maintains. NetApp hopes to sell NearStore to customers who would have otherwise opted
to back up their near-term data on tape.
The major technical difference between NearStore and NetApps NAS filers is that NearStore uses IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) drives, which are less expensive per megabyte but less reliable than Fibre Channel storage. IDE drives are the standard drives used in PCs.
The products will be priced at roughly 2 cents per megabyte; the entry-level 12-terabyte model will list at $250,000, NetApp says. The vendor is using Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO) IDE drives in the new products.
Santora admits that NetApp hasn't ironed out all the wrinkles involved in the new design. For instance, he acknowledges NetApp is still figuring out the right number of IDE drives per parity drive in the systems RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) configuration. (A parity drive is the drive in a RAID
system that mirrors the bits on the primary drive; it's there in case the
first disk fails.)
The current test unit has seven drives per parity drive. That may be too high or too low -- we dont know, Santora says.
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