Iomega Offers Big Storage Perks at a Small Biz Price

The fact that small businesses face the same fast-paced storage growth issues as enterprise companies isn’t exactly a newsflash. So how do you address your storage needs when you don’t have the budget to afford, or IT staff to understand, the more expensive and complex products available to the big guys?

Fortunately, one of the most consistent trends in this digital age is that the technology in enterprise-class products trickles down to small business. Case in point; Iomega just announced a new addition to its popular StorCenter line of networked attached storage (NAS) products.

According to Tom Kampfer, company’s president and COO, the Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS 150d is the first one-terabyte (TB) NAS product to offer enterprise-level features for less than $800. “We designed the 150d specifically for the small business person,” says Kampfor. “It’s exactly what network storage should be for that community.”

The shoe box-sized 150d comes in both one and two TB models. The 1TB version sells for $799, includes Gigabit Ethernet port for quick network performance and Iomega’s Discovery Tool to ease setup. It consists of 250GB SATA drives and supports RAID 0, 1 and 5. The 2TB version offers the same features but costs $1,499 and uses four 500GB SATA drives.

So what about those enterprise-level features? The 150d’s hard drives are hot-swappable. What does that mean, and why should you care? It means that should one of the 150d’s four drives fail, you can remove it and insert a replacement drive. The 150d will then automatically rebuild the new drive into the existing RAID 1 or 5 array. You can do all of this without shutting down the device, which means you and your employees can keep working without interruption.

Iomega says it designed the StorCenter Pro NAS 150d with enterprise-level features and priced it with small business owners in mind.

You can also use the 150d as a printer server. Plug a printer into one of the four USB ports at the back of the NAS box, and you can share that printer on your network.

Iomega also includes a five-person license of EMC’s Retrospect Express software for data backup and disaster recovery — a step above the typical single-license deal that comes with most other storage devices.

Kampfer notes that storage designed for SMBs is also crossing over into the home, and that there’s a lot of focus on media and networked products.

“Millions of small offices and homes rely on a network to share and consolidate data or to share an Internet connection or a printer, and the 150d combines the best price, performance, software and support available today,” he says. “It provides secure site for business files, photos, music and multimedia content and other data.”

Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com