Compellent unveils combined NAS/SAN device

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Storage vendor Compellent has unveiled a new storage appliance that combines network attached storage (NAS) and a storage area network (SAN).

Compellant's new Storage Centre SAN version 3.6 supports block- and file-level storage access, which it claims will simplify management and reduce storage costs and complexity.

The NAS hardware is comprised of a single dual-core 2.4GHz chip, 4GB of memory, two Gigabit Ethernet ports as well as two 4Gbit/sec Fibre Channel ports or two iSCSI ports.

The company has used Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition to manage NAS and SAN in a single device.

Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing at Compellent said that teaming with industry partners such as Microsoft would "reduce storage costs and make administration as simple as possible."

It also supports data de-duplication, which according to Compellent will result a 35 per cent reduction in disk space.

The diskless NAS system is booted up from the SAN using set-up tools provided by the Compellent. It also supports integrated Multipath I/O (MPIO) for FC or iSCSI failover and Virtual Disk Service (VDS) for volume management; CIFS, NFS, HTTP, and HTTPS protocols.

The company believes that administrators will be able to manage SAN volumes and multiple Fibre Channel and iSCSI connections from the NAS system.

The device will give customers "the flexibility to manage and recover both block and file-level data from a single centralised storage platform," according to Kornfeld.

The new offerings will retail for $36,000 (£18,000) with a diskless NAS running Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 with Fibre Channel connection and 4TB of capacity. Adding a NAS system to an existing SAN would cost $9,995 (£5,000).

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