Next week is a big week for EMC. Not only will it combine CLARiiON and Celerra mid-range arrays in the VNX family on 18 and 19 January, EMC will also launch a low end VNXe3000 range.

According to Oz writer Simon Sharwood, the VNXe is an all-in-one integrated box, unlike the larger VNX products, and resembles the stealth Celerra NX3e seen last year. A big difference is that neither Fibre Channel host access nor drives are supported.

There are two models: the VNXe3100 and the VNXe3300, with 6-96 disk drives and 7-120 disk or flash drives respectively. The SAS disks can be enterprise SAS or nearline SAS, which is slower to access and holds more data.

For file access, the X-blade controllers and system memory are integrated into the same enclosure as the drives, with NFS and CIFS supported. There can be one or two integrated storage processors (SP) for block access: the 3100 has 4GB of RAM per SP and the 3300 has three times as much – 12GB – with iSCSI as the only supported block access protocol.

The VNXe3000s are the replacements for the Celerra NX4, and, we surmise, the NX3e, together with the CLARiiON AX4. EMC sees the two VNXe products being bought by small and medium business (SMB) and the bottom half of the mid-market, with some sales into remote and branch offices and departments of large enterprises. The buyer is an application specialist or an IT generalist. They will be recommended the boxes for virtualising Microsoft applications under either VMware Essentials or Hyper-V.

The VNXe3000s will compete with Dell/EqualLogic, HP MSA P2000, and NetApp FAS 2000 products. Pricing starts at under $10,000. ®