EliteNAS by Sans Digital Supporting SAS and SATA HDDs

Sans Digital announced that its EliteNAS EN208L+BXE, EN212L+BXE and EN316L+BXE are now capable of supporting both SAS and SATA hard drives and are designed with SAS expansion ports.

             EliteNAS EN208L+BXE

The newly upgraded NAS series could now be expanded by connecting 7 units to reach a maximum of 122 hard dives, for a total of 224TB of unified storage supporting both network share and iSCSI protocol. The 12-bay EN212L+BXE and 16-bay EN316L+BXE are now equipped with SAS expansion without additional cost, while the expansion feature is an optional upgrade on the EN208L+BXE for $850.

The typical network attached storage (NAS) only supports up to their predetermined storage size based on the number of drive bays allowed. With increasing storage requirements, purchasing a new NAS with more drive bays has been the only way to expand storage capacity when using traditional NAS. EliteNAS EN208L+BXE, EN212L+BXE and EN316L+BXE SAS upgrades are designed to fulfill this demand for expansion. With the new expandable configuration, all three models are now capable of connecting to a EliteSTOR SAS expander JBOD unit, such as ES208X+BE, ES316X+B or ES424X+B for the connection of up to 7 units or a maximum of 122 drives. With the latest 2TB hard drives, a total of 224TB of storage space could be created without the need to purchase additional relatively expensive NAS units. This new configuration also supports both SAS and SATA drives, so users could choose between high performance SAS hard drives and high capacity SATA hard drives. Supporting RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50 and 60, the NAS rackmounts are also designed with built-in dedicated 1200MHz hardware RAID processor, dedicated or global spare drives, along with online storage expansion and migration, so critical data is protected while no downtime is needed during expansion.

In addition to performance and redundancy, the EliteNAS series supports both NAS for data sharing and iSCSI for virtualization applications such VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. Folder replication, snapshot and iSCSI initiator and target are also included. Server Failover Mirroring option is available to provide automatically failover when hardware failure occurs. To guarantee performance, Intel Xeon Nehalem quad core CPU and 3GB of triple channel DDR-3 ECC memory is used with dual Gigabit network interface. Optional 10Gb Ethernet network interface controllers are available to provide performance 10x faster than Gigabit Ethernet. All models are design with redundancy power supply, built-in rackmount rails and hot-swappable hard drives trays. All of these enterprise features are now available for less than $5,500.

"The added expansion feature on the EliteNAS makes purchasing decisions much easier," said Grandy Chen, President of Sans Digital. "Companies could start off by purchasing the head unit and add additional storage spaces later when needed."