Today, we have storage news from Rackable Systems, which is dropping its RapidScale storage product; Nexsan, which unveiled The Edge SMB storage system; and IBM, which released its XIV clustered storage system.

Rackable Systems last week announced that it would divest itself of its RapidScale storage systems. The disvestiture includes patents, hardware, the development team and any on-going business relationships. Rackable’s RapidScale storage consists of high-performance clustered file system that uses commodity based storage and server systems. Rackable acquired the RapidScale storage line with its acquisition of Terrascale in 2006. The company will partner with other storage vendors for clustering. Rackable says it is seeking "strategic alternatives" for the RapidScale product and has retained Strategic Advisory Services International as its financial advisor.

Nexsan Technologies this week announced a new member of its storage family – The Edge – a storage system designed for small and midsized businesses that scales to 84TB of capacity. The Edge intermixes Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI drives in a 9U enclosure and attaches to the network as a network-attached storage device. The Edge uses Microsoft’s Windows Unified Data Storage Server 2003 to provide block-level iSCSI and NAS capability. Like Nexsan’s other storage arrays, The Edge incorporates energy-saving AutoMaid technology and snapshot and replication capability. It is priced at $1,300 to $1,500 per terabyte.

IBM last week quietly announced its XIV clustered storage system in Europe. XIV acquired by IBM this year, consists of a grid of storage 1TB Serial ATA disk drives with Fibre Channel and iSCSI capability, and software that supports remote mirroring, thin provisioning, migration and snapshot technology. It is not intended to replace IBM’s System Storage DS8000. You can read about the software here. 

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.