After a long wait, Fujitsu has revealed its new look global storage brand ETERNUS. It has also introduced two new products, the DX60 and the DX80 online storage systems.

With the introduction of ETERNUS, Fujitsu is also laying out its claim to be a major storage player as it introduces a storage line capable of supporting very large scale storage down to the entry-level.

The new ETERNUS DX60 and DX80 both support hardware encryption, drive spin-down for lower energy use, support for Solid State Drives (SSD) and a fibre channel interface. The entry level configuration will cost just 3,800 Euros. This puts Fujitsu in direct competition with both HP and Dell's latest SME offerings.

It is not just on price that Fujitsu is competing with HP and Dell. Like them, it has added in modular storage so that you can use extension arrays to increase the amount of disk under storage. It is also targeting software features within the storage such as deduplication and thin provisioning.

Fujitsu is targeting hardware encryption as a compliance message for customers. We regularly see stories about drives being purchased on the Internet containing corporate data. Fujitsu says that hardware encryption will stop both drive thefts and accidental exposure of data on decommissioned drives.

To back up its case, Fujitsu is citing the British Standards Institute as saying that nearly 20% of SME's have breached the Data Protection Act at least once with some breaching the law multiple times.

Of more interest, however, is that Fujitsu has become the latest vendor to support Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) as a power saving technology. In the Fujitsu implementation, drives that have not been used for a given period of time will be powered down. What is not yet known is how much they will be powered down. The likelihood is that they will be placed into a much lower spin speed or even parked but that does not mean that the power to the drives will be completely cut.

Fujitsu has also taken this opportunity to introduce SSD drives into the ETERNUS product line. This is clearly targeted at those customers who use a lot of drives for performance but rarely use the entire capacity of the drives. Instead, they use a technique called short stroking where the fastest part only of the drive is used to store data. This consumes a lot of heat and power as it is normally done using drives spinning at 15,000 RPM.

Smaller, faster, SSD drives drawing at least 10W less power per drive means that the power, cooling and noise levels are down while performance is up. This brings OTLP within the reach of smaller organisations. It will also aid those whose applications are currently disk bound.

The problem for the SME is that historically such solutions have been prohibitive due to the need for so many high speed drives. According to Sean Haffey, Manager Large Systems and Storage for Fujitsu said: "These new systems are a real first for small businesses that, until now, have had to sacrifice functionality for finance.  Fujtisu is leading the way by delivering features normally found on systems ten times the price, into the realms of SMBs hit hard by the recession."