News

New NAS Hits the Market

• By Keith Ward
• April 11, 2007

The servers, identified as SMCNAS04 and SMCNAS24, retail for $599.99 and $999.99, respectively. The primary difference between the two models is that the more expensive SMCNAS24 comes with a terabyte of storage out of the box, through four 250GB drives that ship with the unit.

The network-attached storage units are installed and maintained through a Web-based user interface. Each of the units can accept up to four SATA drives, with a maximum storage capacity of 3TB. The drives are hot-swappable, meaning the server does not have to be shut down to pull out or add drives.

Transfer rates, according to SMC, are nearly 400Mbps, which the company claims are the industry's fastest. Standard configurations of RAID 0,1,4 and 5 are supported, giving customers the option to tweak the servers for optimum performance, reliability or a combination of both.

The TigerStore servers come with four Gigabit Ethernet ports and three USB 2.0 connections. Other standard features include disk quota management, hardware health monitoring and a full backup application.

"With this new product, SMC has established the new benchmark for NAS performance. Small businesses now can afford enterprise back-up performance and reliability with the TigerStore SMB NAS Storage Servers powered by LSI NAS SoC," said Jasmin Tremblay, director of product marketing for LSI NAS Solutions, in a press release.

NAS is a popular storage medium for businesses needing the capacity and centralized management unavailable in direct-attached storage offerings, but without the much higher expense and complexity of storage area networks, or SANs. Although the line between SAN and NAS has become more blurred recently, SMBs still traditionally opt for NAS.

Both models are now available. More information can be found at http://www.smc.com.