Sans Digital: 5-Bay AccuNAS Tower AN5L+

Sans Digital is announcing its newest AccuNAS product, the AN5L+.

It is a five hard drive bay iSCSI and NAS unified storage tower utilizing the Intel ATOM based Dual Core CPU with dual GbE ports.

The AccuNAS AN5L+ offers a performance tuned NAS for high capacity network based data storage.

The 64bit OS provides increased performance, enhanced compatibilities and features. The device utilizes the power of the Intel ATOM Dual-Core CPU and 1GB of DDR III memory to provide a faster performance. With the increased CPU processing power, it is able to provide enterprise level features such as an iSCSI initiator and target support, snapshot with scheduling, real-time NAS-to-NAS folder replication, and IPMI.

Along with a built-in RAID-5 and RAID-6, it provides enterprise features that are normally not included in this product price range.

Based on the existing EliteNAS system architectures that range from 1U 4-bay to 8U 72-bay rackmounts, the AN5L+ provides the same capability of supporting both NAS and iSCSI simultaneously. Powered by the Intel ATOM D525 Dual Core CPU with 1GB of DDR III memory, four virtual CPUs (Dual Core combined with Hyper-Threading) working simultaneously to provide network performance of over 80MB/s under RAID-6.

Low power consumption on the Intel ATOM based CPU also allows AN5L+ to generate less heat and requires less power.

Hard drive failures are protected with the built-in RAID-1, -5 or -6 with five hot-swappable trays to minimize downtime in an unlikely event that one or two (RAID-6) hard drive fails.

Also, the individual key lockable hard drive trays provide extra security for unintended physical hard-disk access. The built-in event log and e-mail notification feature provide IT administrators with information from critical errors to changes made to the system configuration.

The dual GbE ports provide features such as network port bonding for failover and load balancing. The AN5L+ also comes equipped with IPMI which is a hardware-level IP based management system that operates independently of the OS. Its feature allows administrators to manage the AN5L+ remotely even in the absence of an OS and therefore can be used before the OS has booted allowing the BIOS settings to be remotely monitored or changed when the system is powered down or in the unlikely event of an OS failure.

It allows data backup to other AccuNAS or EliteNAS storage units while supporting virtualization machines such as VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V.

"The AccuNAS AN5L+ is designed to meet the challenge of today’s continuous data storage expansion need for small or medium business alike without the need to alter current network or system infrastructure," said Stanley Chan, Sans Digital’s director of Business Development.