eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Networking specialist Netgear announced three products, the ProSafe M6100 Chassis Series, ProSafe WC9500 Premium Wireless Controller and the ReadyNAS 3130 Series Network Attached Storage appliance, designed to provide wireless access management, switching and storage in higher-density environments.
The M6100 Chassis Series comprises a Gigabit access layer and 10 Gigabit distribution layer switches in a 4U footprint, with more than 1.4 Tbps switching and routing capacity, passive backplane, full management and fabric nonstop forwarding redundancy.
The M6100 series, priced at $7,990, is designed for use at the center of a small to mid-sized organization network, or as an aggregated or access solution in a larger campus or mid-sized enterprise branch network.
In addition, its operating software and system management features are designed to help take the complexity out of delivering L2/L3/L4-rich services for enterprise edge and SMB core deployments and offers multiple port combinations, with up to 144-port Gigabit or 72-port 10 Gigabit ports.
The WC9500 high performance wireless controller manages the company’s complete line of eight ProSafe Managed Access Points, including single-band and dual-band.
The controller, which will retail for $5,999 can support up to several thousand concurrent clients across 600 access points in a stacked arrangement of three controllers.
“We see deployments for the scale of the WC9500 in hospitals and hotels, where lots of small rooms lend to a higher ratio of AP deployed per square foot,” Peter Newton. senior director of product management at Netgear, told eWeek. “Dense deployments also include education (K-12 and higher education) where in a small confined area (classroom, lecture halls), we expect high number of clients.”
Other features include Layer 2 and Layer 3 fast roaming, a captive portal for guest access, a fully distributed architecture, and ease of configuration and dynamic RF management in dense environments, and a pay-as-you grow licensing model of 10 access point licenses, which cost $1,056.
“Another aspect to ReadyNAS security is that many vendors force users to open ports to the Internet in order to gain remote access to their device,” Newton said. “This type of behavior led to the recent extortion issues for Synology customers. ReadyNAS has proprietary technology that allows users to access their storage anywhere, anytime and from any device by establishing a secure virtual private network between a user and their ReadyNAS device. This connection does not require open exposure to the Internet.”
The four-bay ReadyNAS 3130 with four Gigabit Ethernet ports has a 1U form factor for easy rack deployment in growing offices and a capacity up to 24 TB of storage for supporting up to 200 simultaneous users.
With an updated and more powerful central processing unit (CPU), the 3130 is virtualization-ready with iSCSI support, thin provisioning capability, and interoperability with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V for businesses taking advantage of virtual infrastructures.
The ReadyNAS 3130 is available diskless (RN3130) or populated with four 2TB drives (RN31342E), with the diskless edition available now worldwide for $1,499.