Behold the WD Sentinel DS5100 and WD Sentinel DS6100 S-Series

Oct 10, 2013 12:27 GMT  ·  By

NAS devices started out as squarish, bulky things that could only hold those large, unruly SATA drives, and while the latter part is still true, the former isn't, as made evident by the new WD Sentinel S-Series. Western Digital has introduced two network-attached storage devices for small and medium businesses, called WD Sentinel DS5100 and WD Sentinel DS6100. The S behind the D stands for the S-Series.

They are described as ultra-compact, but that doesn't mean their performance leaves anything to be desired. If anything, the opposite is true.

After all, NAS devices usually employ Intel Atom low-end chips of some sort, but these ones utilize Intel Xeon CPUs instead.

Between that and the four bays, it should be easy to provide networks with 16 TB of always available storage.

Anything capable of tapping into the network will have access to the files, unless administrators and/or owners set certain conditions.

"WD is using enterprise-class components to build a new family of network appliances for small businesses," said Bill Evans, general manager of WD's business storage solutions group.

"The WD Sentinel S-series network appliances are engineered with Intel Xeon processors, pre-populated with WD Se datacenter 3.5-inch hard drives for rapid deployment, and feature dedicated 2.5-inch boot drives for maximum reliability. No other vendor offers a comparable network storage plus server in an equally small form factor. With a small footprint and quiet fan, an S-series appliance can be deployed anywhere."

Unlike other NAS units, WD Sentinel S-Series allow businesses to run line-of-business applications on their network storage platform.

Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials is the operating system installed on the newcomers, while dual-Gigabit Ethernet ports and dual dedicated boot drives (optional on WD Sentinel DS5100) round up the feature set. The encryption capabilities definitely don't hurt either.

The starting price is of $2,560 / €2,560 (WD Sentinel DS5100 4 TB). WD Guardian Services are included with a 1-year free trial.