Iomega ix12 – the ix4’s bigger brother…

Today – the Iomega folks released the ix12-300r, which you can read here.  

This is the slow ramp up to a busy announcement week at EMC world… :-)

Of course just like all iomega ix family it will be on the VMware HCL (not there today, but testing done, will be on there as it refreshes).   While I’m not sure why anyone would want this (tee hee – I’m kidding!!), but it also support Hyper-V and XenServer.

So, what’s the scoop?  Interested?  Read on!

First: it’s a 12 drive rackmount unit that starts at $5K USD for 4TB, and scales up to 24TB for less than $10K USD.

Second: it’s got much more juice.   It uses Intel Core CPUs, more memory, and has 4 GbE ports that can be aggregated, supports VLANs etc…

Third: end-user host-swappable and redundant power-supplies.  Drives have always of course been hot-swappable. 

 

 

Fourth: More software goodness – RAID 6 support, the idea of storage-pool oriented provisioning, Atmos connectivity (replicate to Atmos) and more. 

You can see it in action here:

 

Frankly, watching Iomega grow post acquisition has been interesting.   They moved into the #3 player in the SMB NAS space (measured by units), growing significantly year over year in a tough year.

From the outside, as a nerd focused on VMware-land who buys their own stuff, I would have expected that #1 and #2 would be Linksys and Netgear, and maybe Drobo.   Reality?   According to 3rd party study (In-Stat study), #1 is Buffalo and #2 is Western Digital.  Surprising, until you think about it not from “my” VMware nerd perspective where I’ll hand-assemble my own home-brew :-)  If you think about the customer target – it makes all the sense in the world.

Where can you get them?

Should be on CDW right any second now.   The smaller iomega plaforms (ix2 and ix4) can be bought online, but also at brick and mortar stores:

Americas:

• Fry's
• Staples
• MicroCenter
• Several of the Military Exchanges
• B&H
• J&R

EMEA:

• Media-Markt
• Saturn
• FNAC
• Manor

Comments

[Tom]

I have read:

1) it has only a single controller;
2) it does not accept SAS drives.

To really hit the sweet spot, it should have dual controllers and accept SAS drives. A better low-end choice may be HP's MSA series.

[Todd]

From the press release: "The ix12 is certified for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer."

[Dustin]

HP MSA series is more than 2X the price, so understandable it has dual controllers and SAS options. IX12 is aimed at a smaller tier of customer than MSA. For that level, would be compared to Clariion AX4.

[Dpironet]

Anyone has a link to benchmark tests?
I'm curious how this rackable 'PC' with a lot of disks does perform, especially the IOPS you can get out of it :)
Thx,
Didier

[Red]

Two things I wonder about this, why only 2gb of ram and why so expensive? :(

[CC]

If you don't need SAS drives and don't want to spend 5K$ ... you can grab a QNAP which is currently on the vSphere HCL.

This : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107029

It can hold 8 drives this one needs 2.5" SATA. It's good stuff. You can get 8 x 500GB 7200RPM for cheap and have a nice little lab.

@Chad - Sorry I know it's not IOMEGA or EMC .... Don't beat me :). I promise I'll be good. LoL