The Dell Community has contributed: 9850 ideas | promoted 671626 times | 76900 comments

How IdeaStorm Works:

Post Promote Discuss See
Servers and Storage Comments | Servers and Storage Ideas | Small Business Comments | Small Business Ideas
120

Small Business Network Attached Storage (NAS)

120 points posted to Servers and Storage, Small Business by dwilliam_houston 07/29/07

I feel Dell is missing a big market for Small/Medium size businesses who needed a NAS. Right now the only NAS solutions Dell provides seem to be for the enterprise.

kenjennings
07/29/07		 Dell has a lot of lower end network storage options. (Not necessarily decorated with the Dell logo.) A lot of it falls under "Accessories", not the higher level "storage" category.

In fact, they have the lowest price of any online seller I found for an Iomega 2Tb StorCenter 150D, here (So I bought one. Should be here

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&s...

I got there through the menus:
Home & Home Office > Accessories > Storage, Drives & Media > Hard Drives - External > Network Attached Storage

Maybe Dell could do a better job by reorganizing the web site , so that its easier to find things.
dwilliam_houston
07/29/07		 I understand that you can purchase third party products from Dell and I appreciate the link but I think Dell is missing out and some of my clients would much rather have all Dell hardware in their racks than using 3rd party products.
delluser
08/20/07		 I respectfully disagree with this suggestion. I am using a PE 2900, which has room for up to 10 HDDs, mainly for that purpose. The empty chassis is, IMO a pretty good deal. The price of the rig scales with the number and type of drives (and controller) you add to it.
Overall I am very happy w/ this purchase, except Dell refuses to sell empty carriers for obscure warranty reasons, yet does not offer the highest density SATA drives you can find on the market.
FYI, the machine is *loud and heavy* (designed to live in a computer room) and mine runs Debian Etch (64 bits); OpenManage works perfectly with it thanks to community efforts. Hence it does not *require* an MS server license.
I compared the price, warranty, quality and capabilities of my target config with quality Raid5 NASes, or with drive anclosures (like Dell's MD1000) and found the PE 2900 a better deal for my needs. Today, I'd also consider the PE 1900, cheaper and still roomy. Also, the Xeons CPUs have so much punch I'd probably go for software Raid which provides more flexibilty, IMO, than a hardware controller.
 
Atom feed track comments for this idea
Please log in to post a comment
recently promoted by:
recently demoted by: