ATTO Technology
iPBridge 2700R/D: $4,995
www.attotech.com

When business customers start shopping for storage network hardware, they typically have to choose between iSCSI and Fibre Channel. Organizations already invested in Fibre Channel technology usually continue down that path. Likewise, SMBs already utilizing Ethernet to enable iSCSI pursue the value in Gigabit performance. ATTO’s iPBridge 2700R/D literally connects those two worlds, allowing direct-attached FC storage devices to connect into an Ethernet network.

The bridge features four independent Gigabit ports on one side and two 4 Gbps Fibre Channel ports on the other. Sustained performance up to 120 MBps per Gigabit port is about as close to native FC as you can get. Another of the bridge’s selling points is its Web-based GUI, which makes management a snap. Hardly inexpensive, ATTO’s iPBridge 2700R/D is nevertheless a value-based alternative to retooling your customer’s entire shared storage environment.

AVerMedia
AVerDiGi SA6416 Embedded DVR: $2,999
www.aver.com

THE LATEST IP-BASED CAMERAS OPEN THE DOOR TO RESELLERS interested in delivering security solutions. But once video surveillance is in place, how do you go about managing the data streaming through all day long? What do you do when something happens and you have to call on recorded footage? You are recording, right?

AVerMedia’s AVerDiGi SA6416 Embedded DVR is a storage server designed to house video captured from your customer’s security cameras. The DVR runs Windows XP Embedded from an onboard DOM and saves data to SATA drives mounted in four removable trays. Most of the DVR’s features mimic what you’d find on a basic desktop workstation—512MB of memory, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 support, and so on. But unique support for 16 video inputs and eight audio inputs compressed down through MPEG-4 proves that the AVerDiGi, even though priced at $3,000, is the real deal.

Adobe
Creative Suite 3 Design Premium: $1,799
www.adobe.com

CREATING CONTENT FROM scratch, say for publishing a magazine, involves many tasks, such as layout, proofing, and image editing. You would have purchased each application separately in the past. But Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 Design Premium bundles all the tools you need into one solution.

The suite consists of 11 separate titles, including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat—all Adobe classics. A handful of media management tools link the separate apps together, making it easier to navigate around and manipulate content in one program after another.

Adobe actually sells two versions of its Creative Suite 3 Design package: Standard and Premium. Stepping down to the Standard version saves about $600, but it leaves out Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver—$2,100 worth of software. If your customer is looking for value, taking the package route is clearly a great way to save money.

Netgear
ReadyNAS NV+ 2TB RND4450: $2,350
www.netgear.com

We’ve seen several different networking hardware vendors try their hands at SMB NAS. Drop a couple of hard drives in a sturdy enclosure, add some RAID protection, a network connection, and voila—network storage. But NETGEAR’s new ReadyNAS NV+ takes the idea of basic sharable disk space and adds an enterprise twist your SMB customers are going to like.

The desktop box is large enough to hold four drives and NETGEAR ships with 500GB SATA disks totaling 2TB, all of which are hot-swappable without having to power the unit down. Hardware acceleration of RAID 0, 1, and 5 delivers data protection without a massive performance hit. A combination of Gigabit Ethernet and 256MB of DDR memory ensure information gets to where it’s going as quickly as possible.

NETGEAR’s hardware package is enhanced by a Web-based software setup wizard, a five-client license for EMC’s Retrospect backup application, and a built-in iTunes server.