Iomega opens sub-$2k box of storage tricks

Rackmount NAS and iSCSI for the SMB masses

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 16th April 2009 15:40 GMT

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Iomega has bounded into the SME NAS and iSCSI storage market with a sub-$1,800 box, taking on all other low-end NAS suppliers at their own game, and signifying that unified file and block storage is the way to go.

The StorCenter Pro ix4-200r is a 1U rackmount, 4-bay, 4TB (hot-swap SATA drives), gigabit Ethernet product, offering both file- and block-level access (NFS and CIFS NAS and iSCSI). It offers several RAID options, folder quotas support, jumbo frames, Windows Active Directory support, remote access and management, and VMware Ready certification for vitualisation installations; Iomega are reckoning small and medium enterprises are going the server virtualisation route too.

Its starting price is under $1,800; that's cheap. The operating system is EMC's LifeLine software, running on a 3.2 GHz Intel Celeron processor with 1GB of system memory. It's shipped fully populated with 2 or 4TB of storage and there are scads of other features, such as a UPS, USB ports for additional external storage or printers, network video camera support and realtime video capture. Oh, and it can serve digital media to TVs with integrated DLNA support. This box has a lot of features.

Supported accessing hosts include ones running Windows, Linux and Macs - AFP is supported. Competition includes Overland Storage's SnapServer, Seagate's Black Armour NAS, the Buffalo Terastation, and the DroboPro, to name but four.

We may well see all low-end NAS suppliers adding iSCSI block-level access to their products. The Iomega Pro ix4-200r is available now and the 2TB version costs $1,799.99 with the 4TB model priced at $2,799.99. ®

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