Gridstore Scale-Out NAS For SMBs

Gridstore announced Gridstore NASg 2.0, a NAS solution that offers the simplicity, performance and reliability of enterprise-class storage for the small and medium-sized business.

Using NASg 2.0, managed service providers (MSPs) and SMBs can achieve a powerful NAS storage grid that eliminates storage sprawl and multiple single points of failure while reducing the cost of standalone NAS solutions by as much as a third.

Small and mid-sized businesses depend on their data to run 24/7 like every other business. SMBs are grappling with enormous storage growth in the form of presentations, spreadsheets, word documents, jpeg images and video content. This growth of content is a challenge for SMBs because they have limited staff and budget to deploy enterprise class storage systems. Most SMBs run on standalone storage that is a single point of failure and if the storage system stops – their business stops.

"The problem that scale-out NAS has had in appealing to the SMB is that companies were trying to squeeze enterprise systems into that market. Gridstore has designed a scale-out NAS tailored to meet the needs of the SMB organization allowing them to start small and incrementally grow storage resources in a controlled, cost-effective way while minimizing the complexity and risk of managing multiple storage silos," said George Crump, president and founder, Storage Switzerland. "By leveraging a scale-out NAS building block approach to adding storage, SMBs can eliminate high storage costs while minimizing the reliability and risk of multiple storage silos perpetuated by traditional standalone NAS storage."

The Gridstore NASg storage platform is designed to eliminate the risk, cost and complexity of traditional silo-based storage with a scalable solution that grows based on business requirements. NASg (Network Attached Storage grid) technology is a grid processing architecture that allows storage processing to be offloaded from the storage nodes and distributed across powerful client machines in a network. Storage clients then have parallel access to a virtualized storage pool built from simple, low cost storage blocks. The combination of processing technology and simple building blocks of storage lowers the overall cost and increases its perfomance, scalability and reliability.  

"In my sprawling campus environment, storage sprawl had become nearly impossible to manage," said Ted Malos, director of technology, Ventura Unified School District. "We simply couldn’t continue to keep adding new device after new device as it just doesn’t scale. With NASg, we are cost effectively centralizing our network-attached storage while significantly reducing the risk of failure. I’m very pleased with the enterprise-class features of NASg – it’s a significant value."

With version 2.0, NASg has been enhanced to deliver up to four times faster performance and supports Intel Atom processing power. The new systems feature 1GB of RAM, 1GbE NIC and 25 watts per node and delivers support for complex enterprise network environments. NASg 2.0 storage nodes run on Windows 7 embedded and now provide integration with Microsoft Active Directory and support for all Microsoft OS platforms. The NASg GS-1000 comes in a small and virtually silent 1U form factor that can fit easily on an office desk or in a rack mount configuration.

"Many SMBs have become trapped in a vicious cycle of storage sprawl – adding NAS device after NAS device to accommodate storage growth," said Kelly Murphy, CEO, Gridstore. "Most simply don’t have the budget or in-house IT resources to consolidate their storage, so they simply continue to add on new devices and multiply single points of failure. NASg 2.0 eliminates the heavy up front purchase of a consolidated enterprise platform while giving organizations, no matter how small or large, enterprise-class performance and reliability of a true scale-out NAS – eliminating single points of failure, complexity and cost of multiple devices.  Now, any sized business can run NonStop on Gridstore."

Pricing and Availability
NASg 2.0 is available on April 11, 2011 through Gridstore channel partners with pricing starting at $499 for a 1TB node and $599 for a 2TB node.