Netgear Rolls Out Cloud Storage, New Switches
According to John Grady, Netgear's director of SMB switching, the new gear cements Netgear's place in the SMB, broadening its solution set to target the evolving needs of smaller companies.
First up, Netgear unveiled its first NAS-linked online disaster recovery service for both consumers and SMBs -- ReadyNAS Vault. Drew Meyer, Netgear's director of SMB storage marketing, said ReadyNAS Vault offers cloud-based data protection and is available for all ReadyNAS storage products.
Meyer said the online backup service is built into all ReadyNAS systems, letting users securely copy data to an off-site storage facility and recover data from any Web browser or Internet location. A cloud-based solution, Meyer said, frees up SMBs from the burden of purchasing and maintaining servers, agents and licenses, and the required software is already integrated into ReadyNAS gear, so there is no necessary upgrade or additional infrastructure.
Meyer said ReadyNAS Vault makes all ReadyNAS systems centrally visible in an online console, making management from multiple locations simpler. VARs can use the online interface to confirm that customer backups have taken place, to change backup tasks and to recover critical files from anywhere with a Web connection.
Meyer said along with easing management of multiple customer storage systems, ReadyNAS Vault offers VARs the ability to launch hosted backup services while also giving them a recurring revenue upsell to existing ReadyNAS customers.
Features of ReadyNAS Vault include Web-based management, device-integrated cloud backup, continuous data protection and data recovery. Additionally, ReadyNAS Vault keeps data secure with 128-bit SSL transfer connections and 256-bit AES encryption.
According to Netgear, ReadyNAS Vault is available for a free 30-day trial on all ReadyNAS products. The cloud-based service starts at $5.95 per month for consumers and $19.95 per month for businesses for 20 GB of storage.
Along with launching cloud-based storage, Netgear on Monday also expanded its line of ProSafe managed Layer 2 Fast Ethernet switches. The trio of fully managed 10/100 Mbps SMB switches offers resellers three 1U switches to give their SMB clients more capacity in a pay-as-you-grow model.
Sanjay Kumar, director of product marketing for SMB switching, said the three switches, the FSM726E, FSM7226RS and FSM7250RS, facilitate an expandable platform through true stacking, not virtual stacking or switch clustering.
Kumar said the new switches offer enterprise-class connectivity on an SMB budget. The FSM7226RS and FSM7250RS are fully managed, stackable 24-port and 48-port 10/100 Mbps switches with auto-sensing ports and two Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000 Mbps or 1 Gigabit Ethernet SFP ports. Both switches offer two high-speed stacking ports in the back for additional bandwidth for switch-to-switch communication. The switches also tie in static routing features to route between VLANs and network segmentation.
The ProSafe FSM726E is a managed, 24-port switch that offers the same functionality of the RS models but without the ability to stack and without static routing, Kumar said.
All three switches offer fiber connectivity through two hot-swappable, small form-factor, pluggable Gigabit interfaces and deliver full wire-speed throughput on all ports. Being 1U, they take up less rack space, he added.
For security, the new switches include 802.1x port-based authentication and Access Control List (ACL) for specific traffic and applications. The switches also offer management through SSL for the Web interface and SSH for command-line interface sessions.
Kumar said all Netgear ProSafe managed switches can be managed with a single IP address via SNMP with Netgear's ProSafe Network Management Software.
Additional features include QoS for prioritization of VoIP, video and other realtime applications, and an IGMP querier feature that lets SMBs deploy video surveillance, IPTV and other multicast applications.
The new switches are available now, Kumar said. The FSM726E lists for $299.99, the FSM7226RS for $399.99 and the FSM7250RS for $679.99, and all offer Netgear's full lifetime warranty and optional ProSupport Maintenance Packages.