Winchester Systems announced a new heterogeneous storage appliance called FlashDisk OpenNAS. The company said the storage appliance permits adding storage to a LAN “on-the-fly” without bringing the LAN or servers down or disrupting users and supports.
Winchester also said the product also supports snapshot backups. It is powered by Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Appliance software that supports Windows Common Internet File System (CIFS), Network File System (NFS) for UNIX and Linux, Novell Netware (CNP) and Appletalk Protocol (AFP) file systems.
The company’s FlashDisk OpenNAS is a “filer” comprised of a server running the Microsoft software that provides the network file services attached to the company’s FlashDisk OpenRAID disk arrays, available in fibre channel and Ultra160 SCSI. FlashDisk OpenNAS connects to the network via industry standard Ethernet.
FlashDisk OpenNAS supports heterogeneous clients. Logical volumes can be dedicated to individual operating system file structures. Also, a single volume can serve files to multiple operating systems simultaneously. The product stores the data only once in a standard format and uses built-in presentation layers to deliver data in various formats to different operating systems on each server.
A complete FlashDisk OpenNAS, including the server appliance and snapshot software plus a FlashDisk OpenRAID disk array with 880 GB of storage, is priced at $47,312 with an Ultra160 SCSI connection to the server and $51,994 with a fibre channel connection.
