Small Biz, Big Storage

MicroNet Technology, Torrance, Calif., touts the DataDock II as a portable dual-drive hardware RAID storage solution for customers who require RAID storage they can use anywhere. The DataDock II has space for two hot-swappable 3.5-inch SATA removable hard drives, with total raw capacity of 1 TB, 2 TB or 3 TB. Drives can be set for RAID 0 (best performance) or RAID 1 (redundancy). Price: $299.

Cisco Systems' NSS3000 NAS appliance can be configured with up to four 1-TB hard drives. It runs a Linux operating system and supports a variety of data storage schemes, including RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, as well as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks") in Windows, Mac, Unix and Linux environments. It also includes support for the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) monitoring system for hard disks, file journaling and virtualization of RAID storage systems across Cisco NSS chassis. Price: Starts at $1,132.

Vembu, an India-based software provider that gives solution providers the technology to offer Internet-based data backup and recovery services, launched a new version that integrates with Amazon's S3 storage grid. The new Vembu StoreGrid Cloud AMI is designed for MSPs and solution providers to leverage Amazon Web Services for online backup services to their small-business clients. Solution providers that sign up with StoreGrid Cloud AMI can set up an online backup service without investing a lot of capital or having to own a remote data center. Price: Subscription pricing for the service is $30 per year for desktop PCs; $60 per year for servers; $90 per year for MS Exchange/SQL Servers and MySQL. Volume-based partner discounts apply.

D-Link's DSN-1100 is a five-bay iSCSI SAN array that can be configured with up to five 1.5-TB SATA disks for a total capacity of up to 7.5 TB. The DSN-1100 comes with IP-SAN Device Manager, an embedded suite of utilities for monitoring and control via the Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S) command set. It has four Gbit Ethernet ports that can be grouped for up to 425-MBps bandwidth. It also supports RAID levels 0, 1, 1+0 and 5. Price: Starts at $1,799.

Buffalo Technology, Austin, Texas, is shipping its TeraStation III, a small-business NAS RAID array that can be configured with up to four 500-GB or 1-TB SATA arrays. The TeraStation III connects to a LAN via a Gbit Ethernet port and has two USB 2.0 ports to connect to external hard drives for more capacity. It protects data in Windows and Mac OS environments with RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10. Small businesses can also turn off the RAID for maximum capacity. Price: $1,299.99 for the 2-TB configuration and $2,299.99 for the 4-TB configuration.

Samsung Electronics is shipping an external DVD writer, the SE-S084B series, which comes in a choice of seven colors. The new tray-type DVD writer is targeted at complementing the increasing number of mini-notebook and netbook PCs coming to market. The SE-S084B series gets its data and power through the USB port, and weighs less than 1 pound. Price: $79.99.

The iSeries from Nexsan, Woodland Hills, Calif., is a separate iSCSI head that can attach to any of its other SAS and SATA storage arrays to make them part of an iSCSI SAN. By adding an iSeries iSCSI gateway to a SASBoy, SATABoy, SASBeast or SATABeast array, customers get enterprise-class SAS and SATA storage support along with the company's AutoMAID technology for spinning down inactive hard drives to save power. It also provides virtualization, snapshots, replication, realtime mirroring and data migration, all at no additional software or license cost. Price: iSeries together with a SATABoy array with 4 TB of raw storage starts at $25,000.

Irvine, Calif.-based Paragon Software's Drive Backup 9.0 Server provides complete system backup and recovery for Windows servers and desktops. It backs up data to any type of media, including Blu-ray disks while other applications are running, or users can schedule backups. New with version 9.0 is users' ability to specify certain documents, music, videos or e-mail files. It also includes Paragon's new Professional Adaptive Restore technology that lets customers restore operating systems and data on any type of hardware. Price: Software starts at $299 per server.

The InfiniVault 3 from Boulder, Colo.-based ProStor Systems integrates removable disks to provide the ease of access and performance of online storage at a cost more like that of offline storage. The InfiniVault 3 incorporates RDX removable hard-disk-drive cartridges that are available from multiple manufacturers. The RDX technology allows the hard drives to be inserted and removed as if they were tape cartridges, and are rated with a 30-year archive life. It has a total raw capacity of 1.5 TB, or 3 TB compressed, when all three removable disk bays are filled. Price: $14,999.

The Recovery-300 desktop appliance from Columbia, S.C.-based UniTrends Software Corp. is a small-form-factor, disk-to-disk storage appliance for safe and reliable data backup and recovery of over 1 TB of data on a server for approximately seven days. Because it retains the backup and recovery points of data, the Recovery-300 protects up to 1.125 TB of data while allowing access to all recovery points. Price: Starts at under $4,500.

AppAssure, Reston, Va., introduced Replay AppImage 3.0, the next generation of its application-protection software, which offers continuous application imaging for Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and other Windows applications with an emphasis on recovery time and recovery point objectives. Price: Starts at $899 per server. Options for disaster recovery and high availability are $299 more per server. An application pack for Exchange with single-message restore and on-the-fly corruption detection is $10 per mailbox.

San Jose, Calif.-based Infortrend released an 8-Gbps Fibre Channel array, the EonStor S16F-R1840, which scales from 16 TB to 112 TB with expansion drawers to accommodate growing storage requirements. The S16F-R1840 can be configured for RAID 5 or 6, and includes redundant and hot-swappable controllers, power supplies, cooling fans and backup batteries. The backup battery automatically supplies power to write-cached data into flash for permanent retention during an accidental power outage.

StorMagic, Eden Prairie, Minn., unveiled the SvSAN virtual storage appliance, which allows the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution in VMware ESX virtual server infrastructures. It runs as a virtual machine and enables a virtual SAN to be created using ESX server's internal disk storage and one or more attached external arrays. StorMagic is offering the first copy of its SvSAN product as a free download using a promotion key from the solution provider. Price: Single license is $995 for up to 2 TB of storage, with additional licenses available for up to 4 TB, 8 TB and unlimited capacity.

Dot Hill Systems, Carlsbad, Calif., has a line of 2U RAID arrays with a capacity of up to 24 2.5-inch small-form-factor hard drives or solid state disk drives. Dot Hill's 2722 4-Gbps Fibre Channel array and 2522 SAS arrays include intelligent, fully redundant controllers with optional support for the company's AssuredSnap snapshot and AssuredCopy volume copy data protection software modules. Expansion is possible by adding a 2U, 24-bay 2122 non-RAID SAS unit. Price: Starts at less than $16,000 for a fully populated 3.5-TB SAS drive system.

The Business Continuity Appliance from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Asempra Technologies offers a complete turnkey continuous availability and recovery solution for Microsoft Windows environments. The appliance provides a total storage and recovery solution on a 2U rack-mounted package server appliance. It features plug-and-play installation for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL and file server workloads. The appliance eliminates the need to allocate time to perform daily or weekly backup jobs. Price: $30,000.

Hewlett-Packard's HP StorageWorks MSA2000fc G2 is a 4-Gbps Fibre Channel array that can be configured with up to 27.9 TB of SAS or 60 TB of SATA storage, and supports the new HP 300-GB, 10,000-rpm SAS small-form-factor, 2.5-inch hard drive. It has a faster processor and higher capacity than previous units, supports both the HP-UX and Open VMS operating systems and the high-end HP Integrity server line, and supports Windows and Linux operating systems. Price: Starts at $5,500.

LSI, located worldwide, updated its MegaRAID SAS 8704EM2 adapter with changes to power consumption in RAID configurations. Its new Dimmer Switch feature provides green benefits to data centers by reducing the power consumption of devices attached to MegaRAID adapters. Also, any unconfigured drive connected to a MegaRAID adapter will be spun down after 30 minutes of inactivity. The software also offers support for solid state disk and VMware virtualization. Price: Adapter and software is $399.