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Network-attached storage specialist Gridstore announced that with NASg 2.0, its latest-generation NAS solution for small to midsize businesses, managed service providers and SMBs can achieve a powerful NAS storage grid that eliminates storage sprawl and multiple single points of failure while reducing the cost of stand-alone NAS solutions by as much as a third.
The Gridstore NASg storage platform is designed to eliminate the risk, cost and complexity of traditional silo-based storage with a simple, scalable solution that grows based on business requirements. NASg technology is a grid processing architecture that allows storage processing to be offloaded from the storage nodes and distributed across powerful client machines in a network.
Storage clients then have parallel access to a virtualized storage pool built from simple, low-cost storage blocks. The combination of improved processing technology and simple building blocks of storage is designed to lower the overall cost and increase its performance, scalability and reliability. NASg 2.0 will be available April 11 through Gridstore channel partners with pricing starting at $499 for a 1TB node and $599 for a 2TB node.
“The problem that scale-out NAS has had in appealing to the SMB is that companies were trying to squeeze enterprise systems into that market. Gridstore has designed a scale-out NAS tailored to meet the needs of the SMB organization, allowing them to start small and incrementally grow storage resources in a controlled, cost-effective way while minimizing the complexity and risk of managing multiple storage silos,” said George Crump, president and founder of Storage Switzerland. “By leveraging a scale-out NAS building block approach to adding storage, SMBs can eliminate high storage costs while minimizing the reliability and risk of multiple storage silos perpetuated by traditional stand-alone NAS storage.”
With Version 2.0, NASg has been enhanced to deliver up to four times faster performance and supports Intel Atom processing power. The new systems feature 1GB of RAM, 1GbE NIC and 25 watts per node, and delivers support for enterprise network environments. NASg 2.0 storage nodes run on Windows 7 embedded and now provide full integration with Microsoft Active Directory and support for all Microsoft OS platforms. The NASg GS-1000 comes in a small and quiet 1U form factor that is designed to fit on an office desk or in a rack-mount configuration.
“Many SMBs have become trapped in a vicious cycle of storage sprawl-adding NAS device after NAS device to accommodate storage growth,” said Kelly Murphy, CEO of Gridstore. “Most simply don’t have the budget or in-house IT resources to consolidate their storage, so they simply continue to add on new devices and multiply single points of failure. NASg 2.0 eliminates the heavy upfront purchase of a consolidated enterprise platform while giving organizations, no matter how small or large, enterprise-class performance and reliability of a true scale-out NAS-eliminating single points of failure, complexity and cost of multiple devices. Now, any sized business can run nonstop on Gridstore.”