Snap Jazzes Up NAS Appliances With SAS, SATA Hard Drives
However, solution providers are concerned about Snap's ability to support the channel after the anticipated sale of the San Jose, Calif.-based company, which was acquired by Adaptec in July 2004.
Greg Knieriemen, vice president of marketing at Chi, a Cleveland-based Snap solution provider, said the vendor has an excellent product line and great staff, but the uncertainty over its future is frustrating. "We don't know who will maintain the products or support them," he said.
Knieriemen said he hopes the uncertainties about Snap are resolved soon because the new product line looks great. "They're mixing [SAS and SATA] drives in the same chassis and on the same row. This aims right at the heart of ILM [information life-cycle management]. They get it. It's encouraging to see Snap do it."
Mark Pollard, vice president of marketing at Snap, said he could not discuss the pending sale of the company other than to say several companies have expressed an interest in purchasing Snap, and such a move is still a couple of months away.
New from Snap this week are NAS appliances based on the company's Linux-based Guardian operating system and featuring Opteron processors.
The Snap Server 550 has a 1U NAS head that can connect to multiple expansion chassis that scale to 26.4 Tbytes of SAS capacity or 43.2 Tbytes of mixed SAS/SATA drives. It serves files at up to 88 MBps and comes standard with dual hot-swap power supplies.
The Snap Server 520 is similar, with a maximum capacity of up to 26 Tbytes of mixed SAS/SATA storage and throughput of up to 69 MBps.
And the Snap Server 510 includes a fixed 640 Gbytes of SATA capacity.