Features

EMC Unveils New Products to Target SMB Storage Market

By Sophia Mayengbam

Targeting the small and mid-size (SMB) data storage market and in particular the Asia Pacific, EMC Corp., has introduced EMC Insignia line of hardware and software products for SMBs to store, manage, protect, and share business information. According to EMC, the products are designed to meet SMBs critical information management and storage issues at affordable prices.

"Small and medium businesses are faced with the same challenges as our enterprise customers – explosive information growth, the need to improve productivity and lower costs, and a requirement for simplicity. EMC Insignia brings EMC expertise in these areas to a new and adjacent market at appropriate price points," said Joel Schwartz, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Midrange Systems Division, EMC.

For the new product line EMC has incorporated Retrospect backup and recovery software from Dantz Development Corp., which it acquired in October 2004.

The EMC Insignia includes EMC CLARiiON AX150, EMC Retrospect, EMC RepliStor SMB Edition, EMC VisualSRM SMB Edition and EMC eRoom SMB Edition.

EMC CLARiiON AX150

EMC CLARiiON AX150 disk arrays enable SMBs to consolidate and share storage efficiently among multiple computers and capitalise on the advantages of backup to disk. The combination of EMC networked storage for fibre channel or iSCSI delivers easy-to-use, highly reliable data storage at an affordable price. Its price starts at USD 5600.

The latest version of EMC Retrospect 7.5 gives SMBs a simple but powerful way to protect servers, 24x7 applications, desktops, and notebooks. The backup and recovery software is features self-adjusting backup operations, accurate point-in-time restores, simplified onsite and offsite media management, and encryption of backup media with government-certified AES.

With this latest version users can restore their lost data via a Web browse, freeing administrators from common restore tasks. This also features Microsoft SMS, Active Directory Group Policy, or other deployment tools. The software starts at USD 399.

EMC RepliStor SMB Edition guards SMB’s vital information against hardware failure or site-wide disaster. The software provides replication of data between two Windows computers locally or remotely across the Internet and maintains a continuously updated copy. It costs USD 995 per node.

EMC VisualSRM SMB Edition storage resource management software presents a consolidated view of a company’s storage and hosts automated policies to manage it. VisualSRM SMB Edition starts at USD 995.

EMC eRoom SMB Edition provides a browser-accessed, highly secure collaborative workspace to share information, manage projects, and deliver higher-quality products and services. eRoom SMB Edition starts at USD 995 for 10 users.

"We're seeing the IT needs of small and medium businesses mirroring those of large enterprises, but on a different scale," said Graham Penn, Associate Vice President for IDC's Asia/Pacific Storage Research. "SMBs generally do not have the financial and IT resources to deploy the same comprehensive approaches to storage as large enterprises. Small and mid-size firms definitely prefer suppliers that can provide comprehensive solutions, but they also like the option of adding capabilities a la carte as needed. EMC's latest product range offers SMBs the flexibility of a complete portfolio of capabilities that work together and can be put into place when the time is right."

SMBs, which do business with multinational corporations definitely needs to manage their data and information growth more efficiently. A complete cost-effective data management solution is the call of today’s SMBs.