Back in 2008, enterprise storage titan EMC bought Iomega, the venerable consumer/small-business storage provider best known for the once-ubiquitous Zip drive. Iomega still makes plenty of low-priced consumery products, but it’s been interesting to watch the EMC-owned Iomega emphasize more business-oriented network products. And never more than today: The company is announcing the StorCenter ix12-300r, a rack-mounted network storage unit with twelve bays, giving it the ability to hold up to 24TB of storage.

This StorCenter starts at “under $5000” (yes, that’s $4999.99) for a 4TB version and tops out at $10,000 if you fill all twelve bays with 2TB disks. Iomega says it expects small and medium-sized businesses–it’s designed to serve up to 250 users–to use it for production storage (ie, general-purpose stuff), backup, virtualization, Exchange, and recording video surveillance footage. It sports an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, four gigabit Ethernet ports, and a full complement of certifications for the applications companies are likely to use it with.

The new model makes StorCenter one of the most expansive tech-product lineups I can think of, given that the line starts with the StorCenter ix2-200, a 1TB model that sells for a couple of hundred bucks. I asked an Iomega representative whether the company considered making this an EMC product instead; yup, he said, they did–but the Iomega brand is resonant even for a device as heavy-duty as this one.

The ix12-300r will be available from CDW on May 10th, and other Iomega resellers in June.

 
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