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Iomega: SOHO punters will pay hard cash for our cheap boxes
EMC storage biz unit shows off non-enterprise figures
Networked storage is not just for enterprise buyers. The wee consumer arm of storage-and-networking giant EMC says that small office and home office (SOHO) and small and medium business customers have bought more than a million of its StorCenter networked storage boxes.
Iomega is an EMC business unit focused on selling external storage products to non-enterprise customers. Products range from flash drives, smartphone backup drive/chargers to low-end enterprise filer boxes. Last month EMC and Lenovo, the Chinese PC to server supplier, agreed a deal which included the two setting up a network-attached storage joint venture, using Lenovo cash and EMC IP. The joint venture will use certain Iomega storage assets and resources to sell to SMB and distributed enterprise site customers.
There are three types of StorCenter product, starting with the EZ Media and Backup single drive product for consumers and small office/home office (SOHO) buyers. Next up is the mainstream SMB IX series which comes as the ix2 - diskless or with 2 x 3TB drives - or the ix4-200d, a 4-bay unit with capacities ranging from 4TB to 12TB.
The high-end of the StorCenter line is what Iomega calls the server-class PX series, 4- and 6-bay desktop and rackmount enclosures.
Iomega is cutting prices up to 18 per cent on these PX server class boxes. These include the desktop 4-bay px4-300d 4TB - 12TB variants, the 6-bay px6300d 6TB - 18TB variants, and the rackmount 4-bay px4-300r 8TB model.
It seems EMC is not the only storage player which has seen value in the small biz customer: Seagate recently bought LaCie, which also operates in this low-end storage arena.
The Lenovo-EMC joint venture description suggests that the StorCenter product range will be used by the venture. Lenovo will also be reselling and OEM'ing EMC's own networked storage products, and the separate JV mimics the existing EMC-Iomega separation. ®
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