In the highly competitive data storage space, there is always room for growth: Storage specialist Netgear has brought the midmarket storage market up a notch with the ReadyData storage line, aimed at small and midsize businesses.
The family offers a healthy array of features including thin provisioning, compression and deduplication of block (storage area network, or SAN) and file (network-attached storage, or NAS) data, while also allowing users to leverage thin provisioning in virtual environments, replicate files and databases to off-site locations and recover data with unlimited point-in-time snapshots.
The ReadyData line, available from the companys authorized PowerShift channel partners worldwide in late June, starts at $10,000 with the ReadyData 5200, which offers up to 12 drives in a 2U enclosure and support for two expansion disk arrays. The ReadyData EDA4000, a 4U expansion disk array allowing up to 24 additional drives, is estimated to carry a street price of $2,500, with Serial ATA (SATA), server-attached storage (SAS) and solid-state drive (SSD) packs sold separately.
“SMBs [small and midsize businesses] favor IT solutions that are modular in design and provide the entry-level functionality that they may need initially, while providing the flexibility to scale to future needs,” Jim Browning, vice president at research firm Gartner said in a prepared statement. “This modularity provides them with investment protection and enables them to make incremental investments as time, resources and budget permit. However, they want a complete feature set in their standard pricing. SMBs have cited frustration resulting from unexpected additional charges for key functionality after the initial deployment.”
Other features include cloud-managed replication for disaster recovery, replication over 128-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections for block and file data, backup software compatibility with major vendors like Symantec, Acronis, CommVault, StorageCraft, Veeam and Quest, as well as virtual network interface support, two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and virtualization vendor certifications from industry heavyweights like VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
“We didn’t think we could afford a storage solution with so many advanced features and still make sense of it ourselves. The ReadyData 5200 gave us all of the tools that we thought we couldn’t afford, and we’re especially pleased with the usability,” Dave DePillis at Kelly Kronenberg, a legal services firm in the southeastern United States, said in prepared remarks. “I’m familiar with traditional enterprise vendors and this does just as muchbut costs me a lot less.”
Earlier this month, Netgear partnered with Egnyte, a provider of cloud file-server solutions to offer the Egnyte-enhanced ReadyNAS Pro, which automatically synchronizes the online cloud with a local ReadyNAS Pro. As a hybrid solution, it also allows users to access, share and collaborate from any location, and can be integrated into existing directory services to further streamline user management.