Fujitsu Siemens Computers, a leading European IT infrastructure provider, has announced the introduction of its new NAS Blade meant to fulfill the SMEs' needs for affordable, embedded shared storage in their Blade Server environments. The company's PRIMERGY Network-attached storage (NAS) Blade NX650 has been designed so as to fit into the BX600 S3 Blade Server chassis, a solution able to offer simple, network-wide access to shared stored data.

The newly introduced PRIMERGY NX650 NAS Blade can deliver between 438 GB and 1.4 TB of shared storage capacity for application servers, while its price starts at € 5775 for the pre-configured system that includes PRIMERGY NX650 Server and Storage Blades. The solution provides a better alternative than other pricier external storage subsystems. Moreover, the PRIMERGY NX650 NAS Blade is made available immediately.

According to Fujitsu Siemens Computers, its engineers have developed the PRIMERGY NX650 NAS Blade so as to provide online storage capacity not only to the Server Blades within a PRIMERGY BX650 chassis, but to other servers on the same network as well, which would make its high-speed disk-based storage capacity the central point of a network.

“The idea of creating a Datacenter in a Box meant that we could directly meet customer needs for appropriate local storage within the blade chassis, without the extra complexity of implementing a Storage Area Network. The NX650, which slots in to a blade chassis, enhances the feature richness of our robust PRIMERGY BX600 Blade Servers, making them very suitable for small to medium enterprises,” Said Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President Enterprise Server Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

According to the company, the PRIMERGY NX650 is also easier to manage than larger Storage Area Network (SAN) installations. In addition, it comes with a choice of pre-installed configurations, meaning it could be used out-of-the-box. The NAS Blade has been designed to be a flexible solution, featuring optional full iSCSI support, LAN controllers and support for iSCSI boot.

The PRIMERGY NX650 is running under Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, a task-tailored operating system able to deliver quick and easy deployment along with simplified management via a web-based console. In addition, it can also offer fast data recovery and background shadow copy creation. The trial version of BrightStor ARCserver backup software it comes with is meant to deliver comprehensive protection for business-critical data.