Cisco Gets Serious About Small Biz Storage

Photo of author

Tim Higgins

Cisco today announced a new line of dual-core Atom based NASes aimed at small businesses.

The NSS 300 series includes 2 (NSS 322), 4 (NSS 324) and 6 (NSS 326) bay models and can be ordered diskless or with drives installed for capacities of 2 to 12 TB.

The hardware platform for all models has an Intel 1.66 GHz dual-core Atom processor with 1 GB of RAM, 512 MB of flash, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, five USB 2.0 and two eSATA ports. The LAN ports support jumbo frames and multiple LAN, port trunking, 802.3ad aggregation and failover.

Cisco NSS 300 Series Smart Storage

Both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives (up to 2 TB capacity) can be configured as individual volumes as well as JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+ hot spare, 6, and 6+ hot-spare hot-swappable volumes (as allowed by the number of available bays). Up to eight iSCSI targets can be configured.

The OS is based on a Linux 2.6 kernel and supports EXT 3 and 4 file systems on internal drives and EXT3 / 4, NTFS and FAT on external drives. Volumes can be optionally secured with AES 256 bit encryption.

Features include file sharing via CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS, FTP, FTPS, WebDAV, HTTP and HTTPS, web administration, web server with integrated WordPress, syslog and RADIUS servers, user quotas, AD and domain authentication, Wake-on-LAN, idle drive spindown, scheduled power on / off and UPS shutdown synchronization.

Media features include UPnP AV, DLNA 1.5 and iTunes media servers, web-based media playing and sharing and FTP / HTTP download manager.

Backup features include "one touch" copy and scheduled backup to attached drives, Apple Time Machine support, block-level remote replication and rsync client and server (and rsync over ssh).

All NSS 300 models are covered by a five year limited hardware warranty and are available now at MSRPs of $913 to $5,625.

Related posts

Iomega rolls out new NAS line

Iomega today added new members to its StorCenter Network Hard Drive product line.

Available in 500 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB capacities, all members of the new line feature feature a journaling file system, Active Directory support and come bundled with EMC Retrospect Express backup and disaster recovery software. Other features include Apple Bonjour support and integrated UPnP AV and print services.

Synology Adds Three Expandable NASes

Synology has updated its top-of-line NASes and added another expandable product.

Synology Adds Two-Bay Expandable NAS

Synology's latest two-bay NAS is powered by a quad-core Intel CPU.