SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » Iomega Announces High-End 450r NAS

April 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Iomega Announces High-End 450r NAS

TAGS: SMB Hardware

Iomega's all about small and medium-sized businesses. In fact, only the SMB market--they're very vocal about that. So when Iomega says 'high-end' don't go thinking about a honking rack full of disks and servers like you'd buy from EMC. Think about the new 450r.

It's full name is the StorCenter Pro NAS 450r. Comes as a 1U rack-mount device with fully hot-swappable SATA II drives. It runs Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 on top of two dual-core Xeon CPUs, a gig or so of RAM and dual gig Ethernet ports. Also has a couple of USB ports for easy print serving.

Aside from Windows Storage Server, the box also comes with CA's BrightStor backup, CA's eTrust AV software and a 5-client license of EMC's Retrospect Express client backup software. Your basic backup-everyone-in-a-box package.

The 450r costs $3,999-to-$4,999 depending on whether you choose 1TB or 2TB versions. Iomega says they'll be coming out with a 4TB and larger version later this year, once the right SATA II drives become available. You should be able to upgrade at that time (not confirmed from Iomega as yet), though you'll need to do it across all your disks.

Overall, the 450r looks like a good bet for a medium-sized business. The right network ports so you can plug it into a 1GbE backbone along with your servers, a good OS, a decent backup package. I think it's overkill for small offices, however, so I wish they'd offer more than just a 5-user bundle of Retrospect. Then again, Vista's internal backup package is pretty good and works just fine with Windows Storage Server on the back-end.

The 450r is announced today, but won't be available until the end of the month.

Posted by Oliver Rist on April 12, 2007 09:55 AM

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