Buffalo Technology
LinkStation Pro Duo 2TB NAS: $549
www.buffalotech.com

Consolidating important data from a handful of networked machines is a lot more logistically sound than trying to keep track of individual backups from those same systems. Buffalo’s LinkStation Pro Duo 2TB is a play on making things secure and affordable for your customers and easy to manage for you.

The box ships ready for action, complete with two 7,200 RPM SATA drives, one Gigabit Ethernet interface, and a single USB 2.0 connector for scalability to a second unit. Each of the drives holds 1TB, so you can either stripe them together for 2TB of total capacity or mirror them, halving the configuration’s storage in favor of protection against a drive failure.

Buffalo’s NAS supports Active Directory, making it easy to integrate into a Small Business Server network. It also includes Memeo AutoBackup software, which automates the backup process. Finally, Web access through Buffalo’s own portal site lets customers share files and folders from the NAS—perfect for anyone with project files that they need to make available.

WatchGuard
Firebox X Edge X55e-W: $999
www.watchguard.com

Setting your small business customers up with servers and workstations is the easy part of an infrastructure deployment. Formulating a dependable backup routine is a pretty straightforward process too. But protecting the network against internal and external threats—both of which come in many forms—is always going to be a big challenge for resellers. Fortunately, WatchGuard’s Firebox X Edge X55e-W has the chops to address known vulnerabilities and those that haven’t been exposed yet.

Zero day protection sits at the top of the appliance’s feature list. In a zero day attack, unknown or unpatched resources are targeted. Generally, there’d be no way to protect against them. But WatchGuard blocks any traffic that doesn’t conform to established protocol standards, flags high-risk files, and performs behavior analysis to mitigate attacks.

The X55e-W is intended for 20 to 50 users, offering 100 Mbps of firewall throughput, 35 Mbps of VPN throughput, and as many as 10,000 concurrent sessions. At under $1,000, it’s an inexpensive SMB insurance policy.

Intel
S7000FC4UR 4-Processor Server System: $2,999
www.intel.com

Intel has a lot of exciting hardware in the pipeline. On the processing side, the company’s upcoming Nehalem architecture looks almost tailor-made to improve its standing in the server and workstation space. And an upcoming lineup of enterprise-class solid state storage promises to catapult the I/O performance of applications that move a lot of data. But we’re still several months out on the new microarchitecture.

If you need massive processing horsepower between now and then, have a look at Intel’s quad-processor S7000FC4UR server system that can accommodate quad-core Xeon 7300 or dual-core Xeon 7200 CPUs. The beast features 32 DIMM slots for up to 250GB of DDR2 667 memory, redundant 1,570W power supplies, hot-plug PCI Express for easy storage upgrades, and room for up to eight 2.5” 15,000 RPM SAS drives in a 4U form factor. For customers who need it all—compute muscle, plenty of storage, virtualization, remote management, and I/O acceleration—the S7000FC4UR sits at the top of Intel’s food chain.