Netgear Readies Net Storage

Netgear will ship Infrant's desktop and rackmount NAS systems next week, following its recent acquisition of the company.

The Infrant ReadyNAS boxes, including a four-bay desktop system that can scale up to 2 Tbyte, and a rackmount version, will ship with Netgear badges, following Netgear's acquisition of the storage company this month.

"Infrant lets us leapfrog over Buffalo," said Peter Airs, Netgear's VAR channel manager for the U.K. "We're very excited -- it's what we've been waiting for."

The desktop storage market has been exploding, and Buffalo has led the way with products like the Terastation Pro. Netgear's efforts to retaliate began in 2005 with the two-bay SC101, based on technology from Zetera, which performed poorly, but has recently been upgraded to a Turbo version. D-Link has joined in with a two-bay enclosure, the DNS-323.

The ReadyNAS NV desktop enclosure is user upgradeable, and Netgear will ship three versions, a 2 Tbyte version with four 500 Mbyte drives, and two 1 Tbyte versions, containing two 500 Mbyte drives or four 250 Mbyte drives, according to Airs, speaking at the Wireless Event in London. The company will also ship the ReadyNAS 1100 rackmount system, which has slots for four drives in a 1U chassis.

The ReadyNAS models will not replace the SC101 Turbo, which will remain on Netgear's catalogue, said Airs. Being Zetera SAN-based the SC systems can function at the block level and appear to networked users as a non-shared private volume, whereas the ReadyNAS functions at the file level and its files are fully shareable.

Netgear has announced a lifetime warranty for all the products which ship in its "blue box" livery. This will not yet apply to the Infrant or Zetera kit, which is only badged. Airs expects ReadyNAS to come under the lifetime warranty in due course -- though this would obviously not cover any hard drives.