By Thor Olavsrud, internetnews.com
Linux hardware specialist VA
Linux Systems Inc. made its first foray into storage solutions
Tuesday with the introduction of the VA Linux 9205 NAS
(network-attached storage) system, an ultradense 2U storage
appliance.
The 3.5-inch high appliance, starting at less than $29,300 for
180GB of storage, is scalable to 2.1 terabytes in an ultradense 8U
form factor or more than 10TB in a standard 42U rack. The 9205 NAS
is a file sharing solution targeted at e-businesses in ISP data
centers where space is at a premium. VA Linux Systems (NASDAQ:LNUX)
said it offers seamless file sharing across multiple platforms —
including Linux, UNIX, Windows and Mac OS — enabling transparent
file access in heterogeneous network environments.
“VA Linux is bringing the power of Open Source software —
reliability, innovation and reduced costs — to the NAS market,”
said Ali Jenab, senior vice president and general manager of VA
Linux’s Systems Division. “E-businesses today need to manage and
store more data than ever before, and Open Source is the key to
keeping up with this rapid pace. VA Linux is re-defining the
storage market by bringing scalable Open Source NAS solutions to
our customers, and backing them with an extensive, best-of-class
service and support package.”
The company said the 9205 NAS is designed to maximize uptime and
reliability through the following features:
- The system uses a serial console setup wizard to connect it to
an existing Ethernet network in minutes, a Web-based GUI for
administration, and is able to be upgraded with additional storage
on the fly - It features Global Status Monitoring for remote management,
including built-in “phone-home” capabilities that send e-mail to VA
Linux tech support and to customer sites at the first sign of
problems - It is shipped with RAID 5 (a number of disk drives used in
combination to provide fault tolerance and increased performance,
RAID 5 provides data striping at the byte level and stripe error
correction) including a hot spare for redundancy with battery
backup for cache protection; the 9205 NAS is also the first
enterprise-level product to offer the ext3 journaling file system,
which provides improved data integrity and recovery in the event of
power interruptions - The system allows tape drives and libraries to be attached
directly for high-performance, LAN-free data backup, and is
qualified to work with Workstation
Solutions’ Quick Restore, an NDMP-based data backup and
recovery solution that enables local backup as well as backup from
the 9205 NAS to a UNIX/Linux backup server for centralized
enterprise data protection - The company will provide access to the 9205 NAS software on the
SourceForge
Storage Foundry, a resource on storage-related software
projects.