Dell Pushes Its Commodity Strategy With New Machines

Dell Computer on Sept. 5 will unveil two storage products designed to make storage administration easier. Dell's play in storage, in fact, is to simplify administration. It fits with the company's overall strategy to commoditize the entire computing market.

Dell's PowerVault 530F will be a storage-network appliance basedon a Dell server. It will sit between servers and storage computers on a Fibre Channel network. The 530F will hold some of the intelligence for the data that sits on Dell's PowerVault storage systems. The machine will control remote mirroring, snapshot copies of data, and three-way mirroring for activities like back up, data mining, or application testing. It will be priced at around $50,000.

The second computer will be something Dell resells for Quantum Corp.: an entry-level network-attached-storage server to be called the PowerVault 705N. (An NAS server stores and moves files on IP networks.) What Quantum calls its Snap Server 4100 takes in 120 Gbytes of file information in 15 minutes and supports multiple levels of RAID for data protection. And being only about an inch high, a lot of them can fit in a standard rack. It will be priced at around $3,000.

Most storage systems have intelligence buried in controllers that can cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. Dell is taking an appliance approach while trying to make enterprise storage a commodity.