Netgear to deliver 24TB NAS system

Netgear has launched a NAS storage appliance for small to medium-sized businesses that promises up to eventually hold up to 24TB of data.

The ReadyNAS 3200, announced on Monday, is a 2U unified storage system with 12 drive bays. At the moment, the rack-mounted appliance provides 6TB or 12TB of storage, and it will soon offer capacity of up to 24TB, as new 2TB drives are made available, according to Netgear.

As it offers support for both Gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI, it is possible to use the 3200 in both NAS and SAN settings, according to Peter Airs, a storage product marketing manager at Netgear.

"This is designed to be a flexible product. It's possible to use it as backup, but you can also use that capacity as hard disk space for running database applications, or virtual machines," he said. "The hot-swappable drives make it easy to expand, and we'd hope that by the time a small business needs more than 24TB, we'll be offering 4TB drives."

The appliance completes Netgear's ReadyNAS range of systems for that small and medium-sized business market.

The ReadyNAS 3200will be available in the UK from early July and costs £3,700. It will ship with Netgear's RAIDiator operating system, automatic backup software and a remote sharing utility for remote site data management.

This is a good price for a system that includes management software, says Rene Millman, a senior research analyst with Gartner Group. "It's possibly not the cheapest tin out there, but what small businesses have to bear in mind is that you need the resources and software to manage this extra capacity that can be bought so cheaply," he said.