New Sonicwall CDP Units

I received an automated email from Sonicwall today listing the spec's on the long awaited enhancements to the Sonicwall CDP product. For those of you who don't know Sonicwall has been making acquisitions over the past couple of years to fill in gaps in its product line for network and security products. Some of these products seamlessly integrate into the Sonicwall family and some of these products are shoe horned into fill a need. Sonicwall acquired the CDP product from Lasso Logic.

The product line has lagged behind in both price point and storage capacity since day one. With small hard drives and lack of support for the Linux operating system the product never really met the needs of our customer base. We were told that the Linux support was coming soon, but the software we have been given is still in beta a year later and does not come even close to matching the power of the Windows tool. We were forced to write our own scripts to move the files to a Windows machine and then let them backup from there. While not an elegant solution it did allow us to meet our customers needs.

Getting back to the automated email; Sonicwall is a releasing a complete revamp of the entire product line with new models and model numbers. The new models are the CDP 110, CDP 210, CDP 5040, CDP 6080.

CDP 110	CDP 210	CDP 5040	CDP 6080
MSRP	$1,999	$3,499	$8,999	$10,999
SKU	01-SSC-9300	01-SSC-9309	01-SSC-9304	01-SSC-9304

Appliance Characteristic
Form Factor	Desktop	Desktop	1U	2U
RAID Support	-	-	RAID 5	RAID 5
RAM included	512MB	512MB	2GB	4GB
Internal drives included (# of Drive Bays)	1 std.	1 std.	4 std.	4 std. (8 max.)
Disk Drive Capacity, Type	400GB	1TB	750GB	750GB
Total Capacity	400GB	1TB	3TB	3TB (6TB max.)
Total Useable Capacity	400GB	1TB	2.25TB	2.25TB (4.5TB max.)
Total Useable Capacity (Typical 2:1 Compression)	800GB	2TB	4.5TB	4.5TB (9TB max.)
Network Interface	100baseT	100baseT	1GbE	1GbE
Hot-swappable & Redundant Power Protection	-	-	-	Yes
Field Replicable Hard Drive	-	-	Yes	Yes

I am intrigued by the increase in disk size but I would have liked to have seen gigabit Ethernet on all models in the lineup. I also would have liked to have seen field replaceable hard drives, mirrored hard drives and more memory in all lower end units.

What I am really waiting for is true Linux support. Linux is a major operating system for us and our customers would love the ability to backup their Linux servers and Windows Servers to the same backup device.

Do you use Sonicwall CDP? What do you think of the new lineup? Let me know what you think?