CANON
PIXMA Pro9500 Professional Inkjet Printer: $849
www.usa.canon.com

WE’RE LONG-TIME ADVOCATES OF LASER PRINTING AS A MEANS TO save SMBs money over the long term. For most jobs—-monochrome or color-—laser does the job very well. But there’s always an exception. When it comes to producing the best looking photographs, inkjet technology still has a leg up.

Canon’s PIXMA Pro9500 is the top of the food chain when it comes to professional inkjet printing. Most of the printers with which you’re likely familiar employ three or four ink tanks. The PIXMA Pro9500 employs a 10-tank Lucia pigment ink system for high-quality shots at up to 13”x19” and resolutions up to 4800 x 2400. Your customer can even create monochrome prints with matte black, photo black, and grey inks.

Professionals looking to put the Pro9500’s 7,680 nozzles to work should already be expecting to pay a pretty penny for professional results. Fortunately, Canon does include all 10 ink tanks with the printer, and replacements are at least reasonable at $15 each.

SEAGATE
400GB Cheetah NS SAS Drive: $749
www.seagate.com

ONCE UPON A TIME, YOU HAD desktop IDE hard drives and enterprise SCSI disks. Nowadays, there are all sorts of options in between those two extremes, from 15,000 RPM SAS disks designed to do high-performance storage to large capacity SATA drives meant for always-on nearline applications.

Seagate is adding a new category to its lineup: low-power, 10,000 RPM SAS drives optimized for environments where capacity means the most. The new drives belong to Seagate’s Cheetah NS family and are available in sizes up to 400GB. Built on the 15,000 RPM chassis, the Cheetah NS gets a big boost in transactional performance compared to other 10,000 RPM drives, yet its smaller platters and slower spindle speed cut operation power by up to 33 percent.

Seagate protects the Cheetah with a five-year warranty, but it doesn’t sound like reliability is a problem for the drive thanks to a 1.4 million-hour MTBF rating and a 10X improvement in unrecoverable error rates.

SYNOLOGY
Cube Station CS407 4-Bay NAS: $599
www.synology.com

NOT ALL BUSINESS-CLASS NAS devices are large, rackmounted appliances. Synology’s Cube Station CS407 proves that you can offer a high-performance, low-cost network storage solution loaded with security functionality in a desktop form factor.

The diminutive box is driven by a 500 MHz CPU and 128MB of memory, which are used to help power the software Synology builds into it. Four internal bays each support 1TB, 3.5” drives, and an additional pair of USB 2.0 ports take external storage. The drives can be arranged into RAID 0, 1, 5, or JBOD configurations, depending on your customer’s application. All of that capacity is made available to networked clients through a single Gigabit Ethernet port.

On the software side, Synology integrated ADS authentication whereby domain users log in to the CS407 via Samba or FTP. HTTPS connectivity, encrypted network backup, and FTP over SSL all help safeguard against unauthorized access to files on the Cube Station.

CYBERPOWER SYSTEMS
OL1500RMXL2U Paragon Online UPS: $749
www.cyberpowersystems.com

OF THE THREE MOST POPULAR TYPES OF BATTERY SYSTEMS, AN ONLINE setup gives your customer the highest level of power protection available—-at a price, of course. CyberPower Systems’ OL1500RMXL2U provides a solid balance between big output and reasonable cost, making it a palatable choice for SMBs with servers that simply cannot go down.

The UPS works by feeding power straight from the battery, which is constantly being charged by incoming AC power. Should the utility line drop, power continues flowing until it’s completely depleted. Irregularities from the wall, such as line noise, transients, and harmonic distortion, all get filtered out.

CyberPower’s midrange model plugs into a standard NEMA 5-15P wall socket and outputs as much as 1,050W across eight available sockets. At full load, the batteries pump out enough juice for four minutes of run time. If your customer needs more, an expansion unit tacks on additional capacity.

TERABYTE SERVER STORAGE TECH
ESR-316 Storage Chassis: $1,600
www.tstcom.com

YOU MIGHT NOT YET BE FAMILIAR WITH TST, BUT WE’RE CONVINCED you should be. The company’s chassis are some of the most well-built we’ve seen, from easily serviceable backplanes to integrated rails able to hold 500 pounds.

If you’re building storage servers, take a look at TST’s ESR-316. The 3U box supports a wide range of server board standards, enabling your choice of Intel- or AMD-based platforms. Sixteen externally accessible drive bays hold all of your hot-swap storage, while two optional internal bays store system files. TST’s standard power supply configuration includes a 650W 2+1 redundant setup, though you can also get fixed supplies.

Depending on what you plan to do with the ESR-316, TST’s techs can outfit it with any number of backplanes: point-to-point SATA, multilane SATA, Ultra 320, or SAS. And the backplane’s horizontal orientation is great for airflow compared to competing vertical designs.