Seagate BlackArmor 4-Bay NAS Family for Small Business

Demonstrating its ongoing commitment to provide small businesses with solutions that meet both current and future storage needs, Seagate announced a complete portfolio of products designed to protect data for sustained business continuity and optimum uptime. First introduced in 2008 as a portable Full Disk Encryption drive, the new Seagate BlackArmor product line is the family name for a suite of network-attached, workstation and portable storage solutions designed to meet the digital asset management needs of small business professionals.

Designed as a simple, easy-to-install and easy-to-manage solution for businesses with little or no IT support, BlackArmor storage solutions are perfect for small office environments with up to 50 employees as well as self-employed professionals. Additionally, the BlackArmor line of solutions provides software management tools that are compatible across the family, providing a consistent user experience and future growth path with minimal training or the need for additional support.

"With increasing economic pressures, small businesses and home offices may become even more likely to have limited or no on-site IT support and many will be reassessing their IT environments," said Ryan Brock, AMI Partners’ vice president of Channels. "Cost-effective, easy-to-use solutions that offer data security and reliability along with a strategic growth path and single-vendor support will be very attractive to this customer base."

The first two products to be announced for this new family of small business storage solutions are the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 and BlackArmor NAS 420 servers, which are designed to provide organizations with a centralized, secure way to manage their business-critical information. Each is a four-bay NAS device, populated with Seagate disk drives. In the case of the BlackArmor NAS 420, it comes with two drives in a four drive chassis. The BlackArmor NAS 440 comes fully populated with four drives. Capacities vary from 2TB in the BlackArmor NAS 420, to a maximum capacity of 8TB in the BlackArmor NAS 440.

Unparalleled Security, Accessibility and Peace of Mind
For companies of any size, keeping business data accessible and secure is vital to maintaining the confidence of their customers, partners and employees. Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 and Seagate BlackArmor NAS 420 network storage servers help companies ensure they operate efficiently, while keeping their business data secure, available, accessible and protected.

Seagate’s years of experience developing robust, secure storage solutions offers customers the right blend of features to meet immediate and future business needs:

• Ease of Use: Self-contained, out-of-the box solutions with on-board LCD Screen, displaying settings and status information – including event alerts – and intuitive management utility for easy configuration and data access;
• Protection: Delivers continuous and automatic backup of business-critical data on up to 50 networked computers with full-system backup and RAID options to help provide data protection and redundancy;
• Security: Individual file to entire volume encryption with intuitive software management for access control at file and folder level with password protection and encryption; included bare metal restore and recovery CD to protect against hardware failure.
• Flexibility: Offers the ability to scale from two to four drive configuration with two, four, six and eight terabytes of storage so companies can pick the right solution to meet their business requirements;
• Accessibility: When away from the office, customers can access and share business content securely from the road with an Internet browser without any extra installs or software. Companies can invite colleagues and clients to access select files and folders without needing an FTP site, while keeping their firewall intact and maintaining the security of their network;
• Continuity: Designed with hot swappable, user-serviceable drives and RAID options to enhance performance and scalability, the BlackArmor 440 and 420 network storage servers help ensure business continuity. The four USB ports can be can be used to attach external USB drives for offsite rotation in order to guard against the consequences of natural disasters; BlackArmor network storage servers also ship with an external power supply and user-serviceable fan to cover foreseeable failure points and thus minimize downtime.
• Investment Protection: Part of an all-inclusive small business storage portfolio, which offers interoperability amongst all products and strategic storage growth path. Each customer’s purchase has a three-year limited warranty and the peace of mind of knowing their business is backed by a storage industry leader.

Technical Specifications and Pricing
Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 and BlackArmor NAS 420 network servers support Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later. Both network servers can be purchased through channel partners and select retailers at the following manufacturers’ suggested retail prices (MSRP):

• Seagate BlackArmor NAS 420 network servers – four-bay, two drive configuration, $799.99 USD for 2TB
• Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 network servers – four-bay, four drive configuration, $1,199.99 USD for 4TB, $1,699.99 USD for 6TB and $1,999.99 USD for 8TB

These products will be available in May.