Interop '07: NetGear shows 3 terabyte hardware RAID-based NAS (it's a Web server too)

Here in Las Vegas at Interop 2007 while roaming the show floor prior to the start of the event, I bumped into the folks at the NetGear booth who were preparing to announce several products at the show. But the one the grabbed my attention was the latest ReadyNAS network attached storage device. The ReadyNAS brand came to NetGear by way of its acquisition of Infrant earlier this month. Infrant clearly had some new updates to existing line up in mind (mostly in the area of increased capacity) and here at Interop, NetGear was showing off a version of the ReadyNAS that goes up to 3 terabytes.

ReadyNAS is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it runs on hardware-based RAID. Second, it natively supports the network filesystem protocols for Windows, Mac, and Linux which means that unlike other NAS' that often dumb themselves down to SMB or CIFS as the filesystem lingua franco that Mac and Linux users must force themselves to talk to (sacrificing certain functionality along the way).

A third interesting feature of the ReadyNAS is its USB port which can be used to turn it into a wireless NAS. You just need to connect a USB WiFi adapter to it. That obviously means it must have built-in driver support and according to company officials, ReadyNAS supports more than just NetGear's USB WiFi adapters. It supports adapter from other popular manufacturers as well. ReadyNAS is also a Web server (if you need one of those). The box is small and tight (easily fits on any desk) but if you want a rack mounted version of ReadyNAS, NetGear has that too. I show both in the video above. Overall, if there's one product I've spied at the Interop that I wouldn't mind having, even at home (to centrally store all the family photos and videos), this would be the one (so far, I'm still looking).