Features - Storage Innovations:

RACKABLE SYSTEMS UNVEILS NEW NAS SOLUTION

Rackable Systems Inc, a provider of compute and storage servers for scale out data center deployments, announced the latest addition to its family of storage solutions with the new S3116-NAS Network Attached Storage server appliance. Built for data centers demanding an affordable yet high-performance Serial ATA (SATA)-based NAS solution, Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS server leverages industry-standard components and a robust feature set to provide a high-value, cost-effective alternative. Optimized for ease-of-use and simplified manageability, the S3116-NAS delivers features traditionally available only on much more expensive solutions.

"The emergence of commoditization in the storage market is driving the development of competitive, lower-cost NAS solutions," said Brad Nisbet, storage program manager with IDC. "Products like Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS appliance, which uses industry-standard components in an open architecture design, will help customers meet their cost and performance demands."

"With the launch of the S3116-NAS, customers no longer have to choose between a low-cost file server and a high-end, proprietary NAS solution," said Geoffrey Noer, senior director of storage products at Rackable Systems. "Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS server delivers the ease of management, compatibility and performance benefits that our customers demand -- in an economical storage appliance that offers enterprise-level capability."

Featuring enterprise-grade, 100 percent duty cycle SATA disk drives and up to four terabytes of storage capacity, Rackable Systems' S3116-NAS appliance is designed for easy, rapid deployment with minimal administration and high availability. Leveraging a fully-integrated NAS software layer from Mountain View Data, the system delivers shared, heterogeneous access from Linux, UNIX, Windows and MacOS clients -- based on an advanced journaling file system supporting snapshots. The S3116-NAS is ideal for a variety of applications, including video streaming, rich media archives and near-line storage.

"The Rackable Systems S3116-NAS server took only minutes to install, was incredibly easy to use and its performance surpassed our greatest expectations," said Chris Marks, president of Netfronts, a leading Web hosting provider. "Deploying this system has given us the ability to handle the traffic generated by 30,000 Web sites, which is four times what we support today."