Buffalo Technology Offers Easy-to-Expand iSCSI to the Channel
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Storage
is a lot like closet space, you can never have enough and as soon as
you think you do, you find more stuff to put in there. Then Buffalo
Technology asked the question, “What if your closets could grow?” The
company answered that question with the TeraStation Pro II iSCSI
Storage Solution, a SAN solution in NAS clothing.
The
TeraStation Pro II iSCSI Storage Solution was designed from the outset
to bring affordable, high-speed storage to networks of any size, with a
slant towards small businesses. The small, toaster-sized unit can house
four drives as large as one terabyte each - bringing the total internal
capacity to four terabytes, which can be further increased by adding
additional USB external hard drives. The internal drives employ SATA
technology to speed data transfers and a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port
brings gigabit Ethernet speed to the device.
With
those specs, one would think the device is all about speed, but there
is much more to the Buffalo’s product than that. Of course, fast
transfer rates are important for busy networks, but one has to consider
many other factors when choosing a networkable storage appliance. For
example, ease of administration, expansion and resiliency all come to
mind as critical criteria.
For
resiliency, the unit supports several RAID modes, including levels 0,
1, 5, 10 and for maximum space a JBOD mode. Maximum protection comes
from RAID 1, which mirrors the drives, while RAID 10 combines RAID 1
mirroring with RAID 0 striping, which boosts speeds without reducing
data protection. Most users will want to choose RAID 10 as the best
compromise between storage space, resiliency and speed, while those
seeking the maximum amount of storage will want to go the JBOD route.
