EMC last week bolstered its products for the small and midsize business and departmental branch office market with the launch of a Celerra network-attached storage server (Compare NAS products), which handles both file- and block-oriented data.

The Celerra NX4 is the newest member of EMC’s Celerra Family – it's is also the smallest in capacity. Other members are the NS20, 40 and 80.

The Celerra NX4 Unified Storage System supports iSCSI, NAS and Fibre Channel and is available in models that scale from 4TB to 60TB of capacity. It is based on the Clariion AX4 storage system, which EMC released in January.

Aimed at the SMB market, the array allows both Serial-Attached SCSI and Serial ATA to be intermixed on the same disk shelf. It has two active-active controllers.

The NX4 is 5U tall, has a minimum of four drives and a maximum of 60 drives and four 4Gbps ports. It is managed with Navisphere Express storage software. Without problems, IT admins should be able to install the system in less than 15 minutes, EMC claims.

The NX4, which competes with NetApp’s FAS2020a, supports Microsoft, Linux, Unix and VMware, as well as Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle.

An entry-level Celerra NX4 starts at $20,375 for 4TB of storage, NAS, iSCSI and snapshot capability. The device will also be available from Dell.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.