PROMISE TECHNOLOGY
VTrak M610p RAID Storage: $4,799
www.promise.com

NEVER MIND VIRTUALIZATION AND BLADES. WHEN IT COMES TO ADDING storage, the only way to grow is by adding hard drives. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to sell your customers brand new storage servers. Direct-attached JBODs are a much more practical solution.

Promise’s 3U, 16-bay enclosure caters to SMBs who want the capacity advantages of SATA storage while benefitting from dual Ultra320 SCSI links. In taking the Ultra320 route, multiple VTrak enclosures can be daisy-chained.

The M610p supports RAID 0, 1, 1E, 5, 6, 10, and 50. Promise includes 256MB of performance-enhancing cache with room for up to 1GB. Battery backup for that cache memory is included. An embedded management interface makes it easy to monitor and control drives in the enclosure without the need for another piece of software on your customer’s server.

AMD
ATI FireGL V5600: $599
ati.amd.com

ATI LAUNCHED ITS SECOND-GENERATION UNIFIED SHADER architecture a couple of months ago. (The first generation is part of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console.) Despite clear performance improvements across the board, from entry-level to the enthusiast desktop cards, there was no denying that ATI’s offerings hit retail much later than originally forecasted. Determined to make up for lost time, the company is moving more quickly with its professional FireGL lineup and is the first out with a mid-range board based on the unified shader architecture.

Priced at $599, the FireGL V5600 would be considered expensive in the gaming world. However, workstation cards frequently run in the four-digit range because they’re heavily optimized, tested, and certified to work stably with professional applications. AMD’s ATI 512MB FireGL V5600 is no exception. The hardware’s recently updated driver includes a new Auto Detect feature that adjusts driver settings each time a user opens a recognized application.

CA
ARCserve Backup for Microsoft Small Business Server Premium: $699
www.ca.com

RECOVERING FROM A DISASTER is nasty business and doubly so when your SMB customer is only running one server with a centralized system for storing data. Every server you sell should include some hardware concession for backup, whether it is a DAS drive attached via USB or a network repository taking important files from systems connected via Ethernet. Paired to a solid software solution such as CA’s ARCserve Backup, you can offer the simplicity of wizard-based configuration with comprehensive coverage.

Because ARCserve Backup for Microsoft Small Business Server Premium is optimized for the value-packed SMB operating system, it naturally includes agents that handle backing up Exchange Server and SQL Server. Multiplexing support makes it possible for multiple jobs to run at the same time on the same media, speeding up office-wide saves. Of course, comprehensive device support means you can back up to disk, tape, or optical media and still perform bare metal restores after a hardware failure.

AMCC
3ware 9690SA-4I4E SAS Controller: $925
www.3ware.com

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, 3WARE WAS A SATA-ONLY STORAGE VENDOR advocating the technology’s value in SMB environments where SAS simply wasn’t necessary. That’s a hard sell nowadays, though, when competitors are offering RAID controllers that do SAS and SATA together for close to the same price.

Eager to even out the odds with a SAS controller of its own, 3ware has been hard at work on the 9690SA series, consisting of three low-profile boards mixing internal and external SAS connectivity. The 9690-4I4E is perhaps the most flexible with its four internal and four external connectors. Used in conjunction with expanders, you can connect those eight ports to a maximum of 128 drives, yielding the utmost in scalability.

An onboard I/O RISC processor and AMCC’s own eighth-generation StorSwitch architecture deliver hardware acceleration of RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, and 50 arrays. An extra 512MB of DDR2 memory with ECC protection buffers the data piped through the card.