MicroNet Reaches for 4 Terabyte Mark

“Small business” does not mean small storage needs. But you know that.

Just as large enterprises face growing mountains of digital data and regulatory requirements to protect and preserve that data, small businesses struggle with storage planning as well.

To help give you a little more elbow room when it comes to storage, MicroNet Technology earlier this week announced the Platinum NAS 4.0. The product, the company said, offers a new 4-terabyte capacity standard for the small business network-attached storage market by using 1 TB Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives.

According to Joe Trupiano, director of marketing at MicroNet, the Platinum NAS 4.0 offers the capacity, performance and high-availability small businesses need in a plug-and-play package that combines the industry’s newest 1 TB disk drive technology. “Small businesses have disproportionate storage needs,” Trupiano said, “Their storage needs pretty much double every year.”

MicroNet’s Platinum NAS 4.0 features big-time storage thanks to four 1 TB SATA drives.

Trupiano said that MicroNet’s Platinum NAS 4.0  incorporates a high-availability design that includes features such as hot-swappable disk drives for zero downtime operation. The Platinum NAS 4.0 also supports RAID levels 0, 1 and 5, including one-to-many RAID 1 mirroring and improved reliability with an integrated backplane designed to boost signal integrity and eliminate the need to daisy-chain disk drive cables.

“RAID is mandatory for SMBs,” Trupiano said. “RAID is important because all drives eventually fail.”

And, of course, you never know when those failures will occur. “As rule of thumb,” Trupiano said, “most drive failures happen in the first three months.” Conversely, some drives last several years. “If a drive makes it two years, there’s good chance it’s going to make it the next three years.”

MicroNet Platinum NAS 4.0 offers fast I/O operations, the company said, thanks to its Intel XScale 64-bit network storage processor and a RAID controller that supports four independent SATA drive channels, which is designed for high-speed data access across all ports simultaneously.

The new NAS device also features 256 MB of write-back/write-through error correcting cache memory and standard dual-channel Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, which is designed to minimize data bottlenecks and enable multiple subnetworks and workgroups to access the server simultaneously with no impact on throughput.

If your business has a mix of operating systems in use, the Platinum NAS 4.0 supports for Windows (including Vista), Linux and Apple platforms. Macintosh support is not surprising given MicroNet’s roots in the Macintosh prepress industry.

MicroNet Platinum products are available from directly from MicroNet, from authorized VARs and from catalogue resellers.

The Platinum NAS 4.0 will be available in the second quarter, according to Trupiano. He said the 1 TB version will cost $879 and the 4 TB version is expected to sell for about $5,000.

Dan Muse is executive editor of internet.com’s Small Business Channel, EarthWeb’s Networking Channel and ServerWatch.