Storage Expo, London Evesham Micro is jumping into the low end NAS business with a compact Windows fileserver based on Intel's LeNA reference design. Called SilverSTOR XS, the NAS box can have up to four hot-swap SATA drives for up to 1.6TB of capacity, and runs on an Intel XScale processor.

"It has a Linux-based operating system stored in Flash memory, plus XScale is much more power-efficient," said Evesham product manager Chris Wintle. The SilverSTOR device also has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a Mini-PCI slot for an optional 802.11a/b/g wireless card, although Wintle said the wireless drivers won't be available until December.

The device is CIFS-only so will not support Linux or Unix clients that look for NFS filesharing, Wintle added. It works with Microsoft's Active Directory or can be used on its own, with data volumes, users and groups defined via a simple Web-based management panel. SilverSTOR prices range from £579 for a unit with two 80GB drives to around £1,200 for a 1.6TB box.

"You could do the same thing with a PC, but it probably wouldn't have built-in RAID or hot-swap drives," Wintle said. "This is a dedicated fileserver for up to 30 users in a small office."®