MEET THE NEW NAS

    We’ve seen a lot of desktop-class NAS devices come and go through our offices. From price to ease of use to feature sets, all units have had their advantages and drawbacks. The truth is that while we’ve drooled over spec sheets and enthusiastically snapped these devices into our LANs, none of them have stood the test of time.

    Clearly, digital homes and small businesses have a mounting need for storage. Find a home or office PC with no data worth protecting, and we'll show you a paperweight. The need for secondary storage as well as primary data backup only climbs with each year. But the world is apparently waiting for the right NAS recipe to arrive and spark mainstream sales. That recipe may have just arrived.

The Back Story
    Finding solid numbers on the desktop network-attached storage market is no easy task. If you want news on how the external storage market is shaping up in the enterprise space and how that area is now moving from single- to double-digit growth, analyst forecasts abound. But for consumer/desktop-class NAS, much professional opinion boils down to conjecture. We know that enterprise technologies that address universal needs, such as data backup and centrally shared file pools, will eventually filter down into the mainstream. We know that people want to make their media, especially videos and audio files, more accessible within their family and friends groups. And we know that small businesses need more storage options just as much as large businesses, but the solutions that have emerged in that gray zone between simple USB external drives and robust JBODs have been plagued with excessive complexity and expense for their target audiences.

FIRST OF THE LINE. Intel's SS4000-E remains a solid NAS solution for small businesses and workgroups. With dual LAN ports and hot-swap drive bays, though, the SS4000-E may be more than some small users need.

    Here's a common scenario: XYZ company has 10 desktops and two servers. All told, those 12 machines have 3TB of capacity between them, of which 1.5TB actually holds data. To back this up, XYZ could opt for one of the several dual-drive USB or FireWire drives on the market and connect it to one of the systems. This offers two problems. First, if the drive is a typical 2x750GB device, it can back up all of the LAN's data, and then it will be stuffed to overflowing. Forget about adding more data either for backup or nearline storage. The second problem is that all 12 systems will be trying to perform read/writes to this drive through the single PC hosting the external drive. This carries the potential for serious performance impact to the host when other LAN members are using the drive.

    OK, so Plan B: Take the host PC out of the equation by buying an affordable NAS enclosure and planting two 1TB drives in it configured for maximum capacity. No more peripheral bottleneck, plus you now have 500GB of headroom. This is a better solution, but it's not great. Five hundred gigs won't last long these days, and when additional capacity is needed, the user will have to add a second NAS, thus kicking off the drive letter sprawl that faces so many high-end home users and small businesses. Moreover, when it comes to sharing data from the NAS to outsiders across the Internet, many of these enclosures either don't support the capability or do so through cumbersome, confusing logins and other sharing procedures.

THREE FANS, STILL QUIET. Among the eSATA, LAN, and USB ports on the SS4200-E's back panel, you'll find three fans. However, even our prototype proved silent in a small room following system boot-up.

    Plan C: Consider a device like Intel's first low-end NAS design, the SS4000-E, code-named Baxter Creek and based on the XScale processor. This sturdy device features four front-loading, hot-swap SATA bays backed by dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, an integrated FTP server, RAID 5, and more. There were rumors of Viiv-oriented "hooks" that would make the SS4000-E appealing to top-end home buyers while small businesses and workgroups would snag the device for its feature set and Intel support. The SS4000-E was a great first effort, but it still had some problems. Intel's bundled software was too limited and inflexible, the two integrated USB ports couldn't add capacity into the primary NAS volume, and the device wasn't optimized for Internet-based file sharing. Plus, the hot-swap functionality–which turned out not to have the universal appeal some originally suspected–added a significant price premium to the total design cost. While some people still buy the SS4000-E even today for this feature, they remain in the minority.

    We at RAM/Tech Insight have tried Plans A, B, and C...and a lot of others besides. The sad truth is that no one has been able to hit on a proper mix of fair pricing, feature breadth, expandability, and simplicity in this space. Everybody knows the market wants a NAS solution based around these criteria, and plenty of manufacturers have taken their best shots. No one has hit the mark. We'll let you decide if the SS4200-E–previously code-named Helena Island and slated to be selling through distribution by the time you read this–is the first to score a bulls-eye

The Box
    Everybody knows that reinventing the wheel isn’t always a bright idea. In trying to devise the perfect entry-level NAS product, vendors often tried to build something fresh from the ground up rather than leverage things that were tried, true, and proven successful. This is why the SS-4200E starts out as a low-end PC. That's not a very sexy way to put it, but what else do you call a Celeron 420 processor with 512MB of RAM sitting on a motherboard featuring the 945GZ/ICH7-R chipset? It's a PC. But that's not a bad thing. In fact, in terms of being able to remedy all of the problems outlined above, it's a really good thing. To bring pricing down, enable more functionality, and broaden third-party support without sacrificing stability, the move to a desktop platform was essential.

    Consider this: Because the SS4200E is based on a desktop platform, it's more expandable than a conventional desktop NAS device. The 1.6 GHz Celeron 420 processor ships by default, but builders can upgrade the unit to a Celeron 430 (1.8 GHz) or 440 (2.0 GHz). Similarly, the single DIMM slot ships with a 512MB DDR2 module in it, but this can easily be swapped with a 1GB or 2GB module if and when needed.

IT'S IN THE SWIVEL. The SS4200-E's four "bays" cleverly sandwich four rubber pegs attached to the drives. Each pair of drives swing up on a hinge to allow easy access to the system's other components.

    It's true that there's little need for such upgrades today. The software-based, integrated RAID enabled by the ICH7-R southbridge requires far less than a 1.6 GHz Celeron to do its job. But remember that this is a PC platform, and as such, it's entirely open to running various operating systems and applications. You wouldn't run resource-intensive software on this platform, if only because the design is "headless," meaning it has no PCI, PCI Express, integrated video, legacy PS/2, or any other means beyond the single enabled Gigabit Ethernet port for providing output. The system is entirely controlled via console software from across the LAN. But there's nothing to say that several months down the road developers won't have built applications to run on the SS4200-E that would benefit from a bump to the CPU and memory. (Note: Intel only specifies compatibility with these three "Conroe-L" SKUs, most likely in order to maintain the ability for passive cooling with the platform's bundled fanless CPU heatsink. The SS4200-E's spec sheet notes a maximum 65W power envelope.)

    Continuing the tour of the diminutive motherboard, you'll find a 24-pin ATX connector and 4-pin ATX12V connector for the CPU's power. There's a small PCIe slot for initial OS installation plus a serial debug header you can probably ignore. A dual USB 2.0 header cables out to a front-mounted port, and there are another two USB ports on the backplane right below the integrated Gigabit Ethernet jack. One IDE port is meant for connecting a Disk-On-Module (DOM) boot system, not a parallel ATA drive. And near this are four SATA ports that tie back to the southbridge. Intel's platform also provides for an optional secondary network port and an optional eSATA connector.

    "The goal here is to apply the lessons we learned with Baxter Creek," says Ranjit Kurup, Intel's product manager for the SS4200-E. "One of the things we wanted to do was get on the Intel architecture roadmap, so we went with the Core-based processors Intel has been marketing, partially to make full use of the power management features built into those chips. And in part because of this, the SS4200-E has multiple target markets, even more than Baxter Creek. Our new storage device will reach all the way down to the higher end of the consumer market and all the way up to medium-sized businesses that can use this as a low-cost storage option in branch office scenarios."

    Writing about products near launch is always risky, but we feel reasonably safe in saying that the SS4200-E will be far more attractive than its SS4000-E predecessor. Instead of a chunky, intimidating, black cube, you now have a more compact, fashionable product that can be mounted vertically or horizontally. Early plans call for swappable color panels (seeing this come to light will probably depend on market adoption), and the overall look is very simple. The sides are single-toned and textured, with only a power button, two USB ports, and status LEDs adorning the front face.

    Pop off the top/side panel and you'll find four 3.5" drive bays. Unlike usual drive bays, these have been designed to make it easy to add and swap storage by sandwiching the drive between two frames. Both the chassis and drive bays are toolless. Drives can't be hot-swapped, but the easy drop-in design makes adding drives a matter of seconds.


“All About Choice”
    While we grimace to use this cliched industry catchphrase, the point is an important one to make. Intel solutions are sometimes tagged as being "exclusive" or "proprietary." The SS4200-E proves that Intel engineers are out to design products that embrace solution diversity and improve the end-user experience, not hamper it. There are no dictates on which vendor's SATA drives you can use or whose memory modules will work or even which operating systems are compatible (although Intel does provide a validated hardware list). If the software is 32-bit and x86-based, it should be compatible. Don't be surprised if you start to see third-party and add-on products for the SS4200-E, as well. For instance, there are rumblings that, if all goes well, we may yet see from Intel an eSATA enclosure capable of holding up to six additional hard drives, making a total accessible pool of 10.

    Intel will be releasing a list of operating systems that have been validated and certified by Intel to be 100% compatible with the SS4200-E platform. In fact, if you've been following Intel's SSR212MC2 storage server, the software scenario is almost identical. Intel is spending a lot of time talking about Microsoft's new storage operating system for consumers, Windows Home Server, but there are also several Linux-based distributions from the likes of Wasabi, Open-E, and others, some of which will be DOM-driven.

    The platform inside the SS4200-E is being sold to major OEMs, all of which are free to design their own shells. Some may be ruggedized for travel; others will look like home theater components. In the reseller channel, there will be two options. The first is an "appliance" featuring the SS4200-E bundled with one of the validated Linux distributions. (Exactly which one hadn't been finalized as of this writing.) The second is a bare box with no drives or software. Early guesses on an MSRP for the latter bundled with Windows Home Server chime in around $500.

    "We will continue to sell this as an appliance to resellers who don't want to do any integration or customization," says Intel's Kurup. "They just want to take it to their customer and have them up and running real quick. But we also offer a hardware-only platform targeted at OEMs and larger resellers. They can buy the hardware-only SKU and load it with the software stack of their choice. But we didn't necessarily want resellers facing a free-for-all, so we engaged with several software vendors and got them to certify their software on our hardware. So we're not just going to market and telling people to sink or swim. We're giving them a list of vendors we know will work. These platforms have been validated, so a customer can go with confidence to a customer and say, ëHere's the hardware from Intel and a list of software from Intel-approved ISVs.'"

    We do know that the appliance version will support RAID 1 and 5. Interestingly, Windows Home Server doesn't use RAID. It uses a proprietary, file-based protection system Microsoft calls Drive Extender, which has nothing to do with Media Center Extenders. Drive Extender is in part a fancy name for a JBOD configuration, allowing you to drop drives of differing capacities into a common, single-volume storage pool. You can start out with, say, two 250GB drives, then add a 500GB, and then a 750GB, and you don't lose any space to parity information or mirroring. This is because Windows Home Server guards data by using folder-level replication. If a folder is tagged for protection (and all are by default), a copy of that folder is made onto a different drive in the JBOD. So if you have a 2TB capacity pool (2x1TB or 4x512GB, for example), writing 1GB of data into a protected folder will chew up 2GB of total capacity from the array. This way, if one drive ever goes offline, all protected data will still be present and accessible on another drive, so the customer has no immediate downtime.

    The other key part of Drive Extender involves data deduplication. To illustrate, imagine multiple users sharing a Windows Home Server. User Jack saves a file to the server. The system will automatically place it on "drive 1" and then place another copy on "drive 2." (Actual drive distinctions get fuzzy in a JBOD scenario.) Now, when User Jill tries to store that same file, data deduplication kicks in. Jill will see a little shortcut to make everything look like she's written the file, but in reality her shortcut is only pointing to Jack's file. The result with Drive Extender is like mirroring with deduplication, yielding protection but with a more flexible way to avoid losing capacity.

   "We didn't want to impose some of the technical know-how required with RAID," says Joel Sider, senior product manager from the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft. "Drive Extender delivers a lot of the benefits of RAID but without the complexity. You can add capacity of any size very easily. When you add a SATA or external drive, the storage pool grows by that drive's capacity amount. It's very simple. By default, you're replicating at the folder level. As long as you have more than one drive in your system, you can dictate which of your folders is going to be replicated."

    This combination of Windows Home Server plus the SS4200-E offers some interesting advantages. With the Linux-based appliance version of Intel's storage solution, incorporation of a USB or eSATA drive into the storage pool isn't allowed. The drive merely shows up as a second drive volume. (You can configure the SS4200-E to back up to the external drive, though, which is an interesting perk.) Intel elected to follow this route for better security and performance. If you kick an external drive's cable and it drops off of a conventional RAID array, you'll sacrifice data protection, access to the data itself, and/or the array's performance. Because of Drive Extender, Windows Home Server has no trouble adding more pool capacity with external drives, and the OS has no feasible limit for the number of drives allowed in a pool.

MIX, MATCH, MANAGE. Unlike conventional RAID, Microsoft's Drive Extender carries no penalty for using drives of differentsizes. Note how simple the UI is for managing a user's storage configuration.

    Resellers should also keep in mind Microsoft's aptitude as a service play. Sure, you don't make much if anything on installing and configuring the OS, but just as ISVs develop for Windows, they can also develop for Home Server. Check out some of the add-ins for Home Server already in the wild at www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins. You can stream music from Home Server to a smartphone, sync the Photos folder with a Flickr account, beam content to any TiVo on the LAN, add a Bit Torrent client, and much more. Resellers can add value by helping give Home Server and the hardware underneath it wider functionality. Moreover, because Home Server is like Small Business Server in that it gives admins the ability to remotely control and troubleshoot PCs on the LAN, resellers can now provide remote tech service to homes running a Home Server as well as to businesses that may not yet be leveraging the vPro platform.

    "This is a real opportunity for integrators, especially people starting to think about addressing the ësmart home,' where not just audio/visual elements and PCs but also your appliances, home security, and HVAC systems are all controlled centrally," says Microsoft's Sider. "We're working with companies like Embedded Automation and LagoTech. While we're offering Home Server for retail through companies like HP, we're also delivering it through the system builder channel. Builders can take the software, put it on a box they think is appropriate to their market, add additional applications, add more storage, and things along those lines for a complete solution bundled with services."

Store More
    Because of the emphasis placed on tying the ideas of Windows Home Server with the SS4200-E, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Intel's box is equally suited to homes as it is SOHO, small businesses, and even mid-sized business workgroups and branch offices. Many of these organizations need or are even required to maintain robust, protected storage, but finding a solution below the level of a rackmount JBOD that's still scalable and suited to a company without dedicated IT staff has been challenging. The SS4200-E can slip nicely into such environments, and buyers will rest easier knowing that the product is backed by Intel's rigorous validation testing, three-year warranty, and top-notch tech support.

    This low-end NAS field has been shaping up to be a serious battleground for years. You need look no further than Iomega's StorCenter PRO150d or HP's MediaServer to see what you're up against. But the situation isn't unlike the sales situation resellers encounter every day when pitching whitebooks. The key is in tailoring to fit a client's unique needs. The SS4200-E versus a big name NAS will probably be more configurable, better serviced, and lower priced. These are three elements with which resellers can thrive and win loyal buyers. If you haven't taken a whitebox approach to desktop NAS before, then the combination of power and convenience found in the SS4200-E may be just your ticket to cracking a new niche.