MicroNet Expands MaxNAS Product Line with Rackmount Units

MicroNet Technology, a provider of storage solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs), announced an extension to its MaxNAS product line with the introduction of the first rackmount MaxNAS units. The MaxNAS 1u and 2u hold four and eight 3.5-inch SATA drives respectively, and can be configured with 1 or 2 terabyte drives, delivering up to 16 TBs of shared storage capacity for the more demanding storage-centric applications.

The MaxNAS appliances are stackable, allowing up to six devices to be connected in a rack and managed as a single volume, helping make capacity expansion easier and giving administrators the ability to manage 96 TBs as a single, high density network storage pool. MicroNet said the built-in iSCSI targets provide an affordable IP SAN alternative for midmarket companies. When configured businesses can set up the servers to access the device as direct-attached-storage over LAN or Internet via the high-speed Gigabit Ethernet connection and enabling network administrator to centrally manage and deploy storage for their entire network.

Both the MaxNAS R4 and R8 NAS appliances support Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux and other environments. The MaxNAS devices give users the option to configure the storage systems with Linux-based ext3 file system or ZFS file systems based on their individual requirements. The ZFS file system also supports snapshot functions, allowing MaxNAS users to implement version control and create and restore remote backups. The Nsync remote data backup application, enabling the automatic upload of files to an external storage device at a designated time. Files can be automatically backed up from field offices to a central office site or replicated to a remote site for disaster recovery purposes.

Additional features include RAID-0, 1, 5, 6, 10, JBOD, multiple RAID Set with Auto Rebuild and SMART, jumbo frame support, AES 256 volume-based data encryption, digital audio access protocol server for Apple's iTunes music application, UPnP media server, photo Web server, multiple expansion ports including USB 2.0, eSATA and PCI-e, printer server support with Internet printing protocol for USB printers and power management with disk spindown for energy cost savings.

Critical components - including drive bays, power supplies and cooling fans - are redundant and hot-swappable. Dual Gig-E ports on both the MaxNAS 4R and 8R enable continuous up time with auto failover and load balancing across the connections. Multiple RAID levels are supported, including RAID-6. Leveraging dual Gig-E connections with link aggregation, the MaxNAS 4R and 8R are equipped with the bandwidth to handle IP video feeds from multiple cameras, which the company said makes them idea network storage appliances to support IP-based video surveillance applications.

"With the unrelenting growth in email archives, databases and digital content there is nothing small about the storage capacity challenges facing SMBs and SMEs today," said Adi Antariksa, director of sales, RAID products for MicroNet. "The new MaxNAS R4 and R8 are optimized to meet the needs of SMB and SME storage environments with designs that allow customers to protect their storage hardware investment and grow storage with the business."