IBM Extends Its SMB Portfolio With New Unified Storage Offerings

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today continued its commitment to small and medium sized businesses (SMB), announcing new unified primary and secondary storage offerings for the enterprise-class performance at an entry level price point.

The new IBM System Storage N3000 series systems -- the N3300 and N3600 -- are designed to specifically help small and mid-sized customers centralize their storage in remote and branch offices, as well as increase performance and scalability by helping to consolidate fragmented application-based storage in a single, easy to use infrastructure.
The N3000 series, with the introduction of the IBM System Storage N3300 and N3600 systems, continues IBM’s commitment to SMB customers -- which includes investing extensively in an ecosystem for education, access to insights from industry thought leaders, easy implementation services and an extensive business partner community to help SMB customers with every aspect of increasing productivity and performance.

"IBM is focused on delivering enterprise-class solutions to the SMB market that are cost effective and easy to use" said Charlie Andrews, Director, IBM System Storage Product Marketing. "With the continued commitment to our N-Series product line, we are helping our SMB customers solve their storage challenges with trusted, innovative solutions that will help them increase productivity and performance, while simultaneously lowering costs. Combined with IBM’s systems, software, and services for small business along with our extensive business partner channel, IBM helps design, deploy and maintain solutions that matter to small and medium sized businesses throughout the world"

The new systems provide high availability, backup and recovery features and simple replication and disaster recovery designed to provide easy-to-deploy mirroring solutions that are tolerant of WAN interruptions. The single, integrated architecture is versatile, supporting current block I/O and file serving over Ethernet and Fibre Channel SAN infrastructures and Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) drive support.

The N3300 has a maximum physical capacity of 24.6 terabytes and the N3600 scales up to 69 terabytes by supporting up to 104 disk drives. The N3000 Series is compatible with the entire family of N series unified storage systems, which feature a comprehensive line-up of hardware and software designed to address a variety of possible deployment environments -- including IBM’s recently introduced DS3000 and DS4000 lines.

To its business partners in North America, IBM recently announced a range of enhancements to the IBM System Storage channel programs, including incentives, co-marketing and enablement. IBM is providing unlimited loaners and trials to its business partners in the U.S. to support sales opportunities and recently announced new BladeCenter and Storage Solution Centers, featuring IBM blade and storage technology for small and medium business customers.

Pricing
The N3000 Series is currently available at starting prices of $17,000 for the N3300 and $22,000 for the N3600. For more information about these SMB solutions, please visit http://www.ibm.com/storage.