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General Information
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November 20, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 28
Page(s) 30 in print issue
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Flexible NAS For The SME
Aberdeen’s AberNAS Line Grows With Your Company
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| ABERDEEN ABERNAS
(800) 500-9526
www.aberdeeninc.com
Description: A line of network-attached storage appliances designed to give SMEs flexibility in storage allocations, expand for high capacities, and aid quick growth in the business.
Interesting Fact: The AberNAS product line can be configured with up to 100TB of storage for a large enterprise. 
|  Flexibility in network storage is often an elusive goal. After all, many companies start out with a 1U rack and then gradually add incremental storage technologies, often ending up with a mish-mash of storage arrays, storage-area networks, and RAID systems. One company is uniquely positioned to make the choice of how to store data much easier.
For companies that find themselves with ballooning storage needs, Aberdeen (www.aberdeeninc.com) offers the AberNAS product line, which is a group of network-attached storage devices made specifically for a growing data center. Available in sizes ranging from basic 1U up to enterprise-class 8U (which can hold 100TB of storage), AberNAS is well-suited to a data center that is still figuring out how much storage is required for Web applications, email, and ERP systems; needs to address ever-changing compliance regulations for data deduplication; or has to adjust for great demands in audio or video storage.
 Product Concept
The concept of flexible network storage for server racks started out at Aberdeen with a series of customer complaints. Third-party products in the NAS market were often sold with standard motherboards inside that were ill-equipped to handle the data center requirements for fast speed, flexibility with operating systems, and easy upgrades. Aberdeen looked at the market for NAS and decided to develop AberNAS primarily with reliability and speed in mind.
“We started to open up [NAS drives], and we saw that they were just desktop motherboards,” says Murat Karslioglu, an Aberdeen product engineer. “And the technical support was not very good either, so we thought we could do a better job. We were using [a technology to build the NAS drives] at that time, and we started to look for an operating system.”
Taking the process step by step, Aberdeen eventually decided to support both Linux and Windows and to offer multiple rack size configurations and a wide selection of drive capacities. AberNAS features hot-swap drive technology for easy replacements in the event of a drive failure. The NAS uses SATA drives at 3Gbps and can be configured in a RAID 6 array for reliable mirrored storage. The power supply itself is also hot-swappable, and the NAS works well in a heterogeneous environment consisting of Mac, Windows, Linux, and Unix workstations. The NAS features the latest in open-ended architecture, and the file system array is maintained independently from the actual drives.
Karslioglu says the main advantage to creating these NAS products initially was that they could handle the calls about technical support themselves, rather than handing off the call to a third-party vendor. The company also considered using Windows and Linux for different models of the AberNAS product line to help meet the needs of SME customers that need that kind of flexibility. Karslioglu says the company learned many lessons initially about how to manufacture the NAS, how to make it reliable, and how to handle technical support calls from customers. Today, he says, AberNAS is “almost perfect” due to this initial investment to make sure the NAS meets the needs of customers.
“Our products are targeted to businesses that want reliability and flexibility,” says Karslioglu. “We leave it to the customer’s choice on whether they have a mixed environment” of Linux and Windows computers and in determining rack size, capacity, and which network switches they use.
Customer-Centric Features
Karslioglu says one of the keys to the AberNAS product, especially for an SME data center, is that the products can be accessed remotely, not just to tap into the NAS at the local data center but also to give IT managers a way to access the NAS in any data center, such as those in a remote branch office. For example, Karslioglu says, the manager might want to inspect a rack in a remote office to discover why there is a drive failure or other problem before visiting the actual location for the repair.
For Linux and Windows on the NAS, Karslioglu says he has seen a variety of needs in a data center, either for standardizing on a Microsoft platform and security protocols or for the added flexibility of Linux for configuring applications. One example of this is that a customer might need to use Linux open-source applications with specific drivers and APIs; with a Linux OS on the NAS, those customers have more flexibility in adding features to support the application infrastructure.
Karslioglu says AberNAS products also benefit SMEs that require “metal to metal” copies of data for deduplication, which is especially important for meeting compliance regulations that dictate how a company stores data, whether it is immediately available in the event of a legal discovery, and how the long-term archives are handled in light of the storage infrastructure.
As further boons to its customers, Aberdeen’s AberNAS solutions come with a five-year warranty—which is unusual in the NAS market—and support for multiple remote session protocols, including SSL, HTTPS, and Telnet.
What this means for an SME is that there isn’t the trap of falling onto one particular storage technology that does not let you expand as the company grows. The multiple sizes and configurations allow SMEs to insert additional NAS arrays as easily as they swap out drives in a server or on a desktop computer. 
by John Brandon
Aberdeen AberNAS Features
• Rack sizes from 1U to 8U
• Capacities ranging from 1TB up to 100TB
• SATA drives running at 3Gbps for fast throughput
• Five-year warranty |
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