Sans Digital Announces NAS Storage Tower

Power-saving features and an Intel Atom-powered CPU are just two of the components of Sans Digital's network attached storage tower, the MN4LA+B.

Sans Digital, a provider of storage subsystems, announced the launch of MobileNAS MN4LA+B, a 4-bay iSCSI and network attached storage unified storage tower utilizing Intel Atom-based Dual Core D510 CPUs with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Based on the existing EliteNAS and MobileNAS series that range from 1U 4-bay to 8U 50-bay rackmounts, the MN4LA+B provides the same capability of supporting both NAS and iSCSI simultaneously while increasing the performance with double amount of bandwidth when compared to the MN4L+B, the company noted. The appliance starts at $759, according to the company's Website.

Supporting Microsoft Windows, Apple and Linux-based networks, with a total of 8TB of storage space, the MobileNAS MN4LA+B is aimed at SMBs (small to medium-size businesses) in need of network storage expansion on a budget. Utilizing the latest Intel-based Atom D510 1.66 GHz Dual Core CPU and 1 Gigabyte of DDR II 667 MHz of memory, four virtual CPUs (Dual Core combined with Hyper-Threading) are working simultaneously to provide network performance of more than 80M bps in RAID 6. The low power requirement on the Intel Atom-based central processing unit also allows MN4LA+B to generate less heat and requires less power consumption, Sans Digital said.

Hard drive failures are protected by built-in RAID 1, 5 or 6 with four hot-swappable trays to minimize downtime in an unlikely event that one or two (RAID 6) hard drive fails. The built-in event log and e-mail notification of critical errors inform IT administrators with a wealth of information from critical errors to changes made to the system configuration.

The dual Gigabit Ethernet ports provide features such as network port bonding for failover and load balancing. Virtualization such as VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V is also supported. The MN4LA+B-s built-in NAS-to-NAS folder replication and snapshot feature also allows for data backup to the same or different MobileNAS or EliteNAS based storage. To take advantage of centralized storage for all virtual machines in VMware ESX or Vsphere, the MN4LA+B can be use as a focal storage point for the VMWare ESX or ESXi sever hosting multiple virtual machines. Utilizing the MN4LA+B as an iSCSI target storage system for the VMware ESX/ESXi server, the MN4LA+B is ready for businesses with VMware storage virtualization needs.

"The MN4LA+B is packed with high performance and redundancy features that is previously only available to large enterprise NAS products," said Stanley Chan, director of business development of Sans Digital. "They can now enjoy the features of the enterprise level storage without paying a premium for it."