2006 Products Of The Year

STORAGE
Intel SS4000-E

With storage on the verge of becoming a commodity, it is harder and harder for VARs to earn a reasonable profit from storage-related devices. That has become especially true in the NAS market, where everyone and their brother offers products both via retail and value-added channels.

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Now, in the NAS arena, the only way to stand out is to do something different. And that's where Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel comes in with the Intel Storage System SS4000-E.

The SS4000-E is targeted at solution providers that want to build their own custom NAS units or, better yet, a white-box NAS solution. An ideal option for small businesses, the SS4000-E is both easy to use and affordable and can safely store up to 2 Tbytes of data. Multiple users can access the unit simultaneously, files can be shared among Windows, Linux and Macintosh users, and they can be managed by user names or groups. Small in size, the SS4000-E also is suitable for consumer use. Solution providers looking to expand into home integration should consider the SS4000-E as a central storage unit.

One thing solution providers will like about the SS4000-E is that it can be configured with different capacities depending on the application and eventually can be upgraded to its maximum capacity of 2 Tbytes down the road. The unit supports up to four 3.5 Serial ATA-I hard disks, ranging from 80 Gbytes to 500 Gbytes. The RAID-configurable drives are hot-swappable to avoid interruption of service when faulty disks must be replaced.

The SS4000-E is available as a barebones unit with no hard drives for $550. That's a beautiful thing for system builders that want to configure it themselves. It's also available preconfigured with four 500-Gbyte hard drives for $2,000.

The SS4000-E has a 2-Tbyte limit as to the size of the storage volume that can be created. It will support 750-Gbyte drives as long as the storage volume being created does not exceed the 2-Tbyte limit. Note that the 2-Tbyte capacity is met only by configuring the unit without RAID.

The SS4000-E is based on the Intel XScale 80219 processor and runs an embedded operating system based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. The four-bay unit is small enough to fit on a bookshelf. It features two Gigabit Ethernet ports for network connectivity; two USB ports allow the connection of external hard disks, flash disks and so forth. A client backup and recovery application included with the unit provides system backup, remote boot and recovery for clients running Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.

Low cost, customizability and Intel's friendly channel program earned the SS4400-E the Product of the Year recognition for storage.

-- Marc Spiwak