Dell Promotes iSCSI

The SMB (small and medium business) market is a place that most computer hardware companies avoided years after years, concentrating their resources on creating hardware products for either individual or home users or for large enterprises and corporations.

This trend changed a while back, when the small and medium business market began being more and more important for all kind of hardware makers, including those that are focused on networked storage and similar fields. According to the news site TheRegister one of the most important hardware manufacturers and vendors, Dell, is preparing for a major storage related product launch in September. It is rumored that the storage device will be iSCSI compliant, as Dell talked about such a device some time ago.

It is said that the new Dell made networked storage device will be named MD3000i and the unit will be very similar to the older MD3000 which acts as Dell's directly attached SAS device. The initial storage capacity for the MD3000i will reach around 400GB SAS drives and it is scheduled to reach 750GB SATA drives by November. A few months back, Dell storage marketing chief Praveen Asthana talked about his company's plans to establish a stronger position on the small and medium business market and the leading technologies that will help Dell achieve its plans are iSCSI and virtualization. ISCSI has a number of advantages over the physical limitations of competing protocols like Fibre Channel, and its ease of use makes it a serious candidate for the SMB market. As Dell said that the new storage machine will be close to the MD3000, the iSCSI enabled MD3000i should hold up to fifteen 3.5-inch SAS hot-pluggable hard disk drives. According to Dell, more details will be available from the 10th of September onward.