Dell goes head to head with EMC

Dell has unveiled high-end tape-backup systems that use Linear-Tape-One (LTO) technology, an open tape specification.

The company is selling the PowerVault 136T with capacity of as much as 14.4TB of storage in 72 cartridges.

The PowerVault can be configured with a fibre-channel networking router to connect the device to special-purpose storage networks. The mid-range system, dubbed 128T, which Dell plans to release later this year, can hold up to 4TB in 20 cartridges.

With the new higher-end product range Dell is set to be in direct competition with the market leader EMC.

Tyrone Kleynhans, product manager at Dell echoed the company's bullish claims: "We are offering our products at much lower prices than EMC. Most customers are fed up paying EMC's high per solution prices so we are coming in with the charge per megabyte model," he said.

The LTO technology was originally developed by HP, IBM Corporation and Seagate. The technology is the backbone of a variety of tape storage products that allow data compression, track layout and error correction code.