Iomega Upgrades SMB Storage Arrays With Ivy Bridge

Iomega continues to expand from its consumer desktop storage niche and into the enterprise market, helped by its acquisition by EMC four years ago.

The company on 17 May augmented its midrange and SMB offerings with a new StorCenter array that is the first of its kind to put Intel’s new Xeon E3-1200 V2 (aka Ivy Bridge) chips to work.

Less Consumption

This is significant because the new Intel Xeon E3-1200 v2 line is the first to feature Intel’s tri-gate transistor architecture, a 3D structure that is designed to substantially boost the chip’s performance while driving down power consumption. eWEEK closely examined how this 3D chip works a year ago.

There is more news here. Because the newest Xeon processors have so much more workload capacity, Intel is able to put more functionality directly into the silicon, saving more computing power for the software applications.

That new functionality here is security, as provided by McAfee, which Intel now owns.

“EMC and Intel have been business partners for a long, long time,” Jay Krone, senior director of Iomega’s consumer and small business product division, told eWEEK.  “EMC owns Iomega, Intel owns McAfee. We like to say, ‘Our parents know each other.’ So it’s a natural that we’d be the first to incorporate the security functionality into our storage.”

This collaboration with McAfee brings a new, hardware-defined protection layer that allows Iomega to become the first SMB network storage maker to run McAfee VirusScan Enterprise natively on network devices, Krone said.

New Array

The StorCenter array (px12-450r is the official designation), equipped with 8GB of RAM, is designed for advanced business computing functions, such as deduplication, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and most storage-based applications, Krone said. It comprises a 12-bay, 2U network storage system plug-in ready for use with 10Gbit Ethernet networks and the upcoming 4TB disk drives.

EMC contributes its LifeLine storage software operating system with integrated cloud-system capabilities to power Iomega’s StorCenter.

The new StorCenter is a ground-up redesign of Iomega’s previous top-of-the-line model, the StorCenter px12-350r, Krone said. The StorCenter px12-450r is available in diskless and partially populated configurations, enabling users to start small in terms of storage capacity, or provide their own HDDs and grow as workloads and storage capacity dictate.

The px12-450r is qualified with a broad range of 1TB, 2TB and 3TB consumer and Server Class Series HDDs, as well as upcoming 4TB HDDs. All product configurations and expansion drives for the px12-450r available from Iomega include Server Class Series ATA drives for the highest reliability.

The new px12-450r also supports solid state drives (SSDs), which are ideal for large amounts of small block random I/O workloads such as virtualisation and database.

Iomega StorCenter px12-450r Network Storage Array will be available worldwide beginning in Q3 2012, Krone said.  It will be available in a range of configurations, from a diskless HDD model up to a 48TB configuration (when 4TB disk drives become available). All product configurations include Server Class Series Serial ATA HDDs (except for the diskless model.) Pricing starts at $5,499 (£4,403).

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