Network solutions company Netgear has announced the addition of several four-bay storage appliances to its family of ReadyNAS products for small to medium-sized businesses.
The company says the ReadyNAS NVX 4-Bay Desktop Storage solution is ideal for SMBs, home offices and workgroups. The company will display its full line of ReadyNAS solutions at the Storage Networking World trade show in Orlando, Fla., this week.
The NVX offers double the performance of previous NV+ units, support for file services (NAS) and application services (iSCSI SAN) for Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac systems, including support for Time Machine in Mac OS X v 10.5 Leopard. It also enables users to securely store, share and protect data across a LAN or WAN, guard against disk failures and grow capacity as needed.
“Netgear is fully committed to providing the best possible networked storage solutions to the SMB market-offering a range of appliances that address different capacity requirements and thrifty IT budgets,” said the company’s vice president and general manager of the networked storage business unit, Paul Tien. “We’re extremely pleased to add iSCSI support to this new NVX platform so we can now provide a unified NAS+iSCSI storage option in a very compact desktop form factor at such an affordable price point.”
At the conference, Tien will also give a presentation on “Multi-layered Backup for SOHO and SMB.”
The entry-level ReadyNAS NVX allows users to centralize data from local systems into a single device and solve problems around capacity growth, remote access, backup and disaster recovery all without IT expertise, the company claims. The ReadyNAS NVX is also able to simultaneously handle file sharing for multiple operating systems and store data for server applications such as e-mail, databases and virtualization.
Netgear is drawing particular attention to its ability to work with Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, thanks to the ReadyNAS RAIDiator operating system. The company’s ReadyNAS devices continue to support the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), enabling native Mac files to be used without restrictions or limitations, Apple’s Bonjour software technology for auto-discovery of the device over a user’s LAN, and dashboard widgets for status monitoring.
“With so many consumers, prosumers and small businesses now loyal fans of both Netgear and Apple products, we’re pleased to inform Mac enthusiasts that our new ReadyNAS products work with Time Machine,” said Netgear’s director of storage networking products, Drew Meyer. “Mac shops, popularly known for storing copious amounts of digital files, will now be able to fully realize the benefits of an industry-leading network-attached storage device that is expandable and seamlessly interoperates with their current Mac backup utility.”
The NVX also includes several layers of protection for data, including drive fault tolerance (RAID), local USB backups, online backups (snapshots) and secure offsite replication to other ReadyNAS systems. An embedded ReadyNAS Vault option lets users automatically archive to an Internet data center and recover from any Web browser. The NVX is available immediately through VARs at an estimated street price of $1,500, with 2TB of storage.