Iomega Unveils NAS Appliance For SMBs

Iomega rolled out a new network attached storage (NAS) appliance Thursday that includes a three-year subscription to McAfee Virus Scan Enterprise for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and distributed enterprises.

The new Iomega StorCenter px12-450r uses the Intel Xeon Processor E3 1200 v2 (dubbed Ivy Bridge and released last month) to increase performance and reduce power consumption. Significant to this announcement is that this is the first Iomega appliance to use an Intel Xeon processor. Previous versions used the Intel Core processor.

The appliance consists of a 12-bay enclosure that can hold as many as a dozen 1-TB to 4-TB SATA disk drives. It connects to the network via 10-GbE ports.

The StorCenter px12-450r supports both block and file operations. It is VMware, EMC Atmos, and Avamar certified and is designed to support virtualization, video surveillance, or public cloud applications.

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The StorCenter px12-450-r uses four-core Xeon processors with 8 GB of RAM in a 2U (3.5-inch) high enclosure. It is one of the first sub-$10,000 NAS devices in the industry to support McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, according to Jay Krone, EMC's senior director of consumer and small business products. In addition it uses EMC's LifeLine Linux-based operating system software to manage the box and has integrated cloud capabilities.

The appliance is the largest of Iomega's NAS appliances--it pushes right up into EMC VNXe 3100 territory. The px12-450r replaces the px12-350r, which was introduced in August 2011, as the largest NAS appliance Iomega makes.

Further, the appliance supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, and 6 protection on a per-storage pool basis and, for block storage, supports 32 LUNs maximum per pool and 128 LUNs maximum per device. For file storage, it supports 256 LUNs maximum per pool and 256 LUNs maximum per device.

Also new to the release of the px appliances is iOS and Android client support for management.

Iomega will add the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise to its other px-Series NAS products, but existing customers will not be able to get the software to add to their appliances.

EMC acquired Iomega in 2008 for $213 million to fill out its SMB storage portfolio. The company also acquired Iomega for its strong distribution channel.

The px12-450-4 is expected to be available in the 3rd quarter of this year. Pricing ranges from $5,499.99, for a disk-less appliance, to $13,000.

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