Netgear Brings Out Enterprise Unified Storage Under $10,000 Street Price

NETGEAR, Inc. announced the ReadyDATA unified storage family.

It is an enterprise-class storage product that is less expensive and easier to use than traditional enterprise offerings. These new products feature de-duplication, thin provisioning and unlimited snapshots, with support for SATA, SAS and SSD disk drives. ReadyDATA scales to 180TB capacity (five times larger than the current flagship model), and includes data replication as a standard feature.

The ReadyDATA platform delivers tier-1 storage features with simplicity. Users can leverage thin provisioning in virtual environments, replicate files and databases to offsite locations and recover data from unlimited point-in-time snapshots, all with few mouse clicks. And, every it includes a cloud-managed replication, ensuring secure, performance DR without extra software, servers or network configuration.

Customers and partners can avoid complex licensing, expensive installation specialists and incremental maintenance agreements, as well as the intimidating prices associated with traditional ‘big IT’ offerings.

ReadyDATA systems include
a set of datacenter-class storage capabilities:

• Thin provisioning, compression and de-duplication of block (SAN) and file (NAS)
• Replication over 128-bit SSL connections for block and file data
• Unlimited snapshots for block and file data
• Scalability up to 60 drives and 180TB total capacity
• Two 10GbE ports and mixed configurations of SATA, SAS and SSD drives
• Capacity expansion support that eliminates RAID configuration time
• Backup software compatibility with major vendors like Symantec, Acronis, CommVault, StorageCraft, Veeam and Quest
• Virtual network interface support for powerful network traffic management
• Virtualization vendor certifications from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix

"SMBs favor IT solutions that are modular in design and provide the entry-level functionality that they may need initially, while providing the flexibility to scale to future needs," said Jim Browning, Gartner VP. "This modularity provides them with investment protection and enables them to make incremental investments as time, resources and budget permit. However, they want a complete feature set in their standard pricing. SMBs have cited frustration resulting from unexpected additional charges for key functionality after the initial deployment."

"We didn’t think we could afford a storage solution with so many advanced features and still make sense of it ourselves. The ReadyDATA 5200 gave us all of the tools that we thought we couldn’t afford, and we’re especially pleased with the usability," said Dave DePillis at Kelly Kronenberg, a legal services firm in the southeastern United States. "I’m familiar with traditional enterprise vendors and this does just as much – but costs me a lot less."

"Not only are we excited by NETGEAR’s growing leadership in the storage market, we’re astonished by how simple this system was to quote, assemble and deliver to our customers," said Jeff Wilhelm, director of engineering with Envision Technology Advisors, LLC, a NETGEAR reseller partner in the northeastern United States.

"We’ve been quietly increasing momentum in the entry-level storage space and are now the leader, according to Gartner," said Drew Meyer, senior director of marketing for the NETGEAR commercial business unit. "We’re breaking new ground for midmarket organizations with the ReadyDATA platform, serving the needs of a market that has long been neglected by traditional vendors."

Pricing and Availability
ReadyDATA products are available from authorized NETGEAR PowerShift channel partners worldwide in late June.

The ReadyDATA 5200, with up to 12 drives in a 2U enclosure and support for two expansion disk arrays. List pricing with 12 enterprise SATA drives is $14,000 with a North American street price estimated under $10,000 USD.

The ReadyDATA EDA4000, a 4U expansion disk array allowing up to 24 additional drives. List price is $3,500, with a North American street price estimated around $2,500 (SATA, SAS and SSD drive packs sold separately).