CANOPUS
EDIUS NX Express: $1,299
www.canopus.com

VIDEO CAPTURE AND EDITING SOFTWARE HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO level even the most powerful workstations. Canopus has just the ticket for your professional customers involved in real-time HD and SD editing. The EDIUS Pro software package is designed for mixed-format environments, preserving compatibility with SD hardware while delivering that step up to high-def.

The bundled EDIUS NX Express baseboard is a PCI Express x1 card that delivers a hardware overlay, writing video data to the graphics card through DMA. The result is a much lower host processor load and smoother real-time workflow. Hardware on the card also accelerates MPEG-2/MPEG-4 encoding for file export.

The EDIUS Pro software takes advantage of that hardware to support a long list of capture and output formats. Canopus also includes output plug-ins for Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and NewTek’s LightWave 3D.

LINKSYS
4 Bay Advanced Gigabit Network Storage System Chassis: $1,299
www.linksys.com

LOOKING FOR A NAS THAT FITS IN PERFECTLY WITH YOUR MICROSOFT SBS 2003 installations? Check out Linksys’s 4 Bay Advanced Network Storage System Chassis, which supports up to 75 concurrent users. The box works under Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating systems. However, that magic number 75 makes the platform an ideal SBS match.

One feature that differentiates Linksys’s Network Storage System chassis is an integrated Linux operating system. Because the OS is built in, Linksys can sell the empty chassis, letting resellers add the drives their customers want. Between the 1U box’s four bays, you get RAID 0, 1, 1+spare, 5, 5+spare, 10, and JBD array support, along with hot-swap capabilities. NT domain and Active Directory authentication helps protect sensitive information, as does 256-bit AES file encryption.

The NSS6000 is flexible yet complete enough that it only requires four drives to become your SMB customer’s first high-end network storage appliance.

RICOH
Aficio SP C411DN Color Laser Printer: $1,599
www.ricoh-usa.com

A COLOR LASER PRINTER WITH networking capabilities is the perfect solution for a business trying to get the most bang for its IT buck. Ricoh’s Aficio SP C411DN is a shining example of what you can do with such a flexible piece of technology.

By default, the Aficio prints at 600 x 600 resolution, though you can set it to 1200 x 600 or 1200 x 1200 for higher quality output. Regardless of whether your customer is printing in full color or monochrome, Ricoh says the C411DN is good for an impressive 31 pages per minute. Pop the chassis and you’ll find an RM7035 processor running at 600 MHz, 256MB of memory (upgradeable up to 512MB), and a 10/100 Mb/s Ethernet controller. A 40GB hard drive is offered as an optional upgrade, as is 802.11b wireless networking and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

More than anything, Ricoh’s Aficio SP C411DN is a solid play on serving an entire small business with a single, affordable printer.

INTEL
Server System SR1560SFHS: $999
www.intel.com

IT’S HARD TO GO WRONG WITH A SERVER PLATFORM DESIGNED BY THE same company that manufacturers the chipsets, motherboards, and CPUs you already use. Intel’s Server System SR1560SFHS gets you elbow-deep into the latest Intel technologies, including quad-core Xeon 5400 and dual-core Xeon 5200 series processors, the 5400 chipset, and Intel’s Server Essentials software package.

The SR1560FHS features a 1U chassis that supports three hot-swappable 3.5” drives. Depending on the backplane you order with it, drive support is either limited to SATA storage or expandable to SAS/SATA. You’ll find Intel’s S5400SF motherboard inside the chassis, enabling up to 64GB of FB-DIMM memory, a pair of processor sockets (that’s a max of eight cores), and several options for expansion. Intel’s list of optional upgrades includes a PCI Express 2.0 x16 riser, dual Gigabit Ethernet module, external SAS connector, Infiniband expansion module, and Remote Management Module 2. Intel’s bundled software package helps VARs with deployment and management, making the SR1560FHS a complete solution.