With growing success in selling Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to mid-sized enterprises, major storage vendors have renewed their interest in the small enterprise. IBM has taken its successful mid-range offering and packaged it for the small enterprise. The Fibre Channel (FC)-based DS4200 Express has a starting price in the range of $12,000.

Introducing the DS4200 Express

The DS4200 Express is a small enterprise-targeted version of IBM's successful DS4000 series, mid-range storage array. The DS4200 includes a 4Gbps-capable FC interface and can scale up to 56TB of SATA storage (with an expansion unit). The base configuration uses as many as 16 SATA drives for a total capacity of 8TB.

IBM sees the DS4200 as a direct competitor to HP's Modular Smart Array 1500 (MSA1500) and EMC's CLARiiON AX150. Storage management features include Dynamic Capacity Expansion (DCE) Flash Copy for point-in-time copies of logical volumes, Dynamic Volume Expansion, and VolumeCopy for...