Better NASes are Promised

THERE WERE TWO classes of new product from Promise at CeBIT, both are NASes, but aimed at different markets. The Smartstor line is home oriented, the VessRAID line is not.

NASes and DASes, oh my

The volume unit of the bunch will likely be the NS4600 is a pretty generic looking 4-bay NAS box. The front has been updated to look a little spiffier, nothing really functional, just a prettier door cover. It has a GigE port, eSATA, and USB ports in addition to a reset button.

One really interesting bit is the software. It can do eDonkey and BitTorrent natively, but they all can now. The cool bit is the box uses EXT3 for a file system, so Promise is likely using a very up to date kernel. I wonder how many of the cool features of that file system it exposes?

The guts are what differentiates the NS4600 from it's predecessors, this one is running an Intel Tolapai @ 600Mhz. Who said the Banias core was dead? RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 5 + spare are supported, more than enough for 4 drives.

From the front, the SmartStor DS4300euf looks identical, but the back has 2 Firewire 800 and a 400 port where the GigE and reset were. Yes, it is a DAS, we lied in the first sentence, but get over it. If you want a decent storage box on your PC, and you have a spare eSATA port, give the DS4300euf a look

VessRAID x 3 in RAID nothing

Should 4 drives not be enough for you, Promise will be more than happy to help you step up into the VessRAID. Like the ES line we told you about last year, the VessRAID is aimed at small to medium businesses. The ES and siblings aimed at the higher reaches of NASdom, and approaches the big boys playing in the SANbox.

VessRAID starts above the DS/NS line, and ends where the ES begins, with 2 SAS controllers internally supporting up to 16 drives. There is only one external controller though, so no failover other than dual PSUs.

It will do all the raid levels from 0 to 60 and has web management. One nice thing is the USB port in the back, you plug in a stick and the server copies the log files to it, a very handy feature. Promise is also promising a direct firmware update in the future, plug the drive in and you are done. No word on when, but it will be welcomed on arrival.

If the phrase 'mission critical' is in your RFQ, none of these solutions are for you. Promise has those things if you want them, but they are another level of power and money entirely. For those without absolute uptime requirements, these all look like decent boxes. µ