EMC’s Low Cost SAN Starter for VMware (Iomega)

Stephen Foskett gave us a teaser last night at the VMware Community Roundtables about an announcement of a low cost SAN solution for VMware labs or small environments.  Everyone on the call would have to wait until he posted about it on his blog that night to find out what the details were.  Originally I thought it might be another software based SAN solution but today I am excited to find out it is IOMEGA’s new StorCenter Pro ix4-200r NAS Rackmount.  For about $1700, you can get a 2TB shared storage solution that supports iSCSI AND is VMware Certified!  IOMEGA is an EMC owned company.

Normally I don’t get so excited about hardware but I still have numerous clients that, although embracing Virtualization and running ESX in their environments, are still rocking their VMs on local direct attached storage.  They love VMware and the benefits of virtualization yet haven’t had the game changing experience of vMotion, DRS and HA! (You know who you are!)  Typically, pricing of the SAN has been the hurdle they haven’t been able to get over.  I’d like to think that this new offering from EMC will be something that no client will be able to pass up if previously price has been holding them back.

Once you get a taste of the benefits that shared storage can bring to a Virtual Environment, the training wheels will come off and you’ll never look back. 🙂

Read all about the ix4-200r on Stephen’s Blog.