RICHMOND HILLS, Ontario – The number of Network Appliance (NetApp) storage offerings, relabeled as part of IBM’s N series of storage offerings, has been expanded.

One of the new devices, the IBM System Storage N5600 is designed for small and medium sized businesses and scales up to 252 terabytes of physical capacity. It is available in two versions: the single storage controller N5600 A10 and the dual storage controller the N5600 A20.

IBM stated in its press release that the N5600 is being positioned between its N5500 and N7600 appliances. It offers simultaneous connectivity to four Gbps Fibre Channel and high speed GbE iSCSI networks and features a 64-bit architecture and PCIe controllers, “designed to allow for easy, seamless updates.”

IBM did not have a spokesperson available to elaborate on the products, but one IT storage expert David Hill described the announcement as “a refresh, upgrade, move forward and the strengthening of a line” for various segments of the storage market.

“It is like playing chess, where you are moving the pawns forward; you are positioning yourself for future moves.”

Also introduced are interoperability features in more enterprise and higher end portions of the IBM N series, developed by NetApp.

“It allows you to manage heterogeneous storage. You can replicate data between the NetApp series gateway and heterogeneous storage, but get all of the functionality that you would get with NetApp storage. They created better interoperability between the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and the NetApp solution,” stated Tony Asaro, a senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.

A second high end feature in the N series is unified storage where multiple types of storage protocols are supported, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, SAN and NAS.

In addition, IBM is introducing SnapManager, which is described as “designed to automate and simplify the complex manual and time-consuming processes associated with the backup, restore, recovery and cloning [features] of Oracle databases.”

IBM and NetApp have had a long standing OEM partnership where NetApp products are sold in the market both under both the StoreVault brand and the IBM N-Series name.

“The market is big enough that they shouldn’t get into each other’s way,” stated Asaro.

The analyst at ESG explained that NetApp benefits from this private labeling of its product because it has less of a presence in SMB than does IBM.

Both NetApp and IBM have channel partners. But IBM has a large installed base of long standing customers that would not consider another vendor, added David Hill, a principal at the Mesabi Group.

“NetApp is able to reach into IBM’s installed base and distribution channels and what IBM is able to do is get a very solid block portfolio of NAS products [developed by NetApp].”

This column was written by Paul Weinberg of ConnectIT