The company scales down its enterprise SAN to fit smaller data centers and makes it as easy to set up as any Windows-based server.
Fujitsu Computer Systems announced a new storage appliance for the midrange market April 7, one that contains much of the same hardware and software that makes up the company's high-end storage line.
Fujitsu's new Eternus 4000 Model 300 SAN Business Continuity appliance employs, on a much smaller scale, the company's trademark storage system, replication software, installation services and bandwidth, Dave Egan, the company's senior vice president for storage, told eWEEK.
The Eternus 4000 Model 300, the base model of which holds about 1TB of usable storage and can scale up to 90TB, was introduced at Storage Network World in Orlando, Fla.
The appliance is a small (about 25 percent the size of a server rack), network-attached, disk-to-disk-to-tape virtual tape library that consists of a pair of rack-mount servers sitting atop the Eternus storage system. It is designed to compete directly against similar offerings from NetApp and Dell.
"It comes pre-configured, pre-loaded, out of the box. All the customer has to do is color-code the cables, obtain an IP address, and follow the wizard to set it up and get it running," Egan told eWEEK. "It's just like administering any other Windows-based server. Anybody who's ever run Windows servers or Windows storage can set this up in about an hour."
The Eternus 4000 Model 300 SAN (storage area network) is a home-developed, fully redundant hardware design with components that are hot swappable, and the system includes hot bays for hard disk expansion, Egan said. Three-tiered storage enables users to choose from the following options: high-performance Fibre Channel drives, nearline SATA (Serial ATA) drives or MAID (massive array of independent disk) groups.
Fujitsu's WAN optimization, included in Eternus-based remote replication software, can deliver up to 300M bps of throughput, Egan said.
Fujitsu, like most other IT companies, is finding new sales opportunity in the midrange to high-midrange market.
"It used to be that Fujitsu sold about 60/40 [percent] enterprise versus channel," Egan said. "Our initial entry was to the enterprise; we had a midrange product line with a high-end [product] directly aimed at the [EMC] Symmetrix/Clariion class of products.
"It did quite well there," he added. "Some of our biggest sites were put in against EMC—which surprised us a little bit, but it was a happy thing. But now, our market focus is changing toward the SMB marketplace—and not really toward the 'S' in the SMB, but more toward the 'mid' enterprise."
Fujitsu considers its market sweet spot to be companies with "anywhere from $100 million [in sales] on up," Egan said.
The midmarket is just now starting to come around to shop for business continuity products, Greg Schulz, senior analyst at the StorageIO Group, said.
"The cost and complexity of piecing together a business continuity solution, let alone managing it, has prevented the majority of SMBs from investing in this critical form of protection, leaving them at serious risk of a major business disruption," Schulz said.
"The Fujitsu approach provides all the required resiliency while eliminating the need to work with multiple vendors and the headaches of integration, support and on-going maintenance. If that were not enough, the fact that the total turnkey solution is affordable makes for a very compelling value proposition when you look at the big picture."
Fujitsu's Business Continuity package will be made available direct from Fujitsu and through the Fujitsu reseller channel. Starting price for a base unit is about $30,000, Egan said.
