StorageTek Aims for the Middle

As part of Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek)s (NYSE: STK) ongoing effort to make a name for itself on the disk side of the storage divide, the company is gearing up to fill a gap in the middle of its primary disk portfolio.

At Storage Decisions in Chicago tomorrow, StorageTek will announce the availability of the latest addition to its primary disk subsystem D-series family, the D240, which is aimed at the midtier. StorageTek licenses the product from LSI Logic Storage Systems Inc., which also OEMs storage arrays to IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) (NYSE: SGI).

“Previously, with the D-series product line, we really had a void in the midrange,” says Jeff Sisilli, StorageTek’s product marketing manager for the D-series. “There wasn’t a middle ground for price performance. Either we had to ask customers to pay for more than what they needed, or we had to discount deeply.”

With the introduction of the new D240, StorageTek has plugged the hole between its D220 entry-level subsystem and its D280 enterprise-level subsystem, Sisilli says (see StorageTek Ships a Disk and StorageTek Whips Out Bigger Disks). According to recent industry research, the midrange market is where most of the juice is these days (see Report: Midmarket Moving to SANs).

StorageTek is positioning the launch as the next logical step in its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, which aims to help customers put different types of stored data on appropriately priced storage. Since all of the D-series subsystems are built on a modular architecture, Sisilli says, companies can simply move the D200 disk drives from one subsystem to a larger one as their storage needs grow, without changing the settings.