"We felt the timing is right now," says Sajai Krishnan, general manger of the StoreVault division. "We didn't want to get into shoe-horning enterprise capabilities or trying to force-fit this on SMB customers. This is a clean-sheet, ground-up business unit created specifically to go after the SMB opportunity."
StoreVault S500 is an "all-in-one" storage product line that supports NAS, iSCSI SAN, and Fibre Channel SAN, Krishnan says. The storage appliance product line is supported by Microsoft as an iSCSI array. NetApp and QLogic are partnering to enable StoreVault customers to start with NAS or iSCSI SAN and then scale the product line to Fibre Channel as needs evolve without having to purchase separate systems.
The StoreVault S500 is designed for businesses with between 50 and 999 employees that have small or part-time IT staffs and limited IT budgets, Krishnan says. It's expected to be used with infrastructures supporting between four and 50 servers, administered by staffs of two to six employees, and by businesses that spend less than $20 a year on storage.
"Storage products that are priced between $15,000 and $29,000 just don't cut it in this market," Krishnan says. "We're taking affordable components and turning them into a rock-solid data platform."
StoreVault is available now through value-added resellers.