I am a firm believer of "Black Box" computing for small business. Mainly because small businesses tend not to have their own I.T. people and thus general computing platforms such as Windows Server that require a moderate amount of tender loving care to keep happy and working are likely to be deposited into a closet somewhere and forgotten about until they die because no-one had performed the routine maintenance tasks the server required.

One relatively recent development in the SMB market has been the filtering down of decent Networked Attached Storage devices. In large businesses these devices have been around for a long time, a great example would be those devices supplied by Network Appliances Inc or Netapp. These superb boxes form the storage backbone of many organisations. However, these boxes also cost significant amounts of money costing well into the tens of thousands of euro and this sort of money is well out of reach of most small concerns.

A few years ago a small company in the States called Infrant started producing a range of products called the ReadyNAS. I acquired one of these devices that contained four hot-swappable disks and driven by a stripped don Linux kernel. It ran for years without problems and provided nearly 1.5TB of storage space.

Since Netgear bought Infrant the same team have released some really serious hardware for the small business market and one of these is the ReadyNAS Pro. I recently swapped out my trusty ReadyNAS NV for a Pro and must say this device is fantastic. For small businesses requiring a file / print server to provide rock-solid storage capacity then look no further.

This device contains up to six disks so having 6 x 1TB disk in a resilient configuration would leave you with 4.7TB of usable disk space. Using the built in X-RAID2 disk configuration you can start with three disks and simply add an extra disk when required. The disk will be automatically recognised and the data volume will grow to use the extra space.

It is also fast and on some sites where I have installed these devices we see a throughput of 100MBytes per second in tests which is almost wire speed for a gigabit network. 

With inbuilt features such as iSCSI (useful for providing extra space for a virtualised environment) , rsync, DHCP and a comprehensive web-based configuration screens this is a serious box of tricks that requires very little maintenance once installed.