Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 is a Johnny-come-lately to the NAS market, but Seagate seems to have done its homework. Aimed at small businesses with 50 or fewer employees, this Linux-based appliance is full-featured and flexible, with the promise of further extensibility via freeware and open source widgets in the near future.
Unlike a great number of NAS offerings on the market, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS 440 is more than just a small Linux box with Webadmin slapped onto it. Although late to the crowded SMB storage market, the BlackArmor appliance is a solid filer with a level of polish that should make it welcome in any small office seeking a few terabytes of network storage.
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Although NFS is supported, Seagate has not included NIS (Network Information Service) or Kerberos authentication. All NFS security is by allowed IP address, which might explain why NFS is turned off by default. Most SMB customers are using CIFS anyway, and configuring allowed IP addresses may be fine for the rest.
Seagate has additional features planned for the near future. On the blackboard are both freeware (but not open source) and open source widgets to extend the platform, additional UPS and DDNS support, and perhaps even greater power optimization. Seagate promises a drop in average power consumption from 45 watts to 15 watts with a forthcoming firmware upgrade, and I’ve got to imagine that judicious sleeping could drop the power usage even lower.
The crowded NAS marketplace is churning out some very capable gear at very affordable prices. The differentiation will lie in what services the vendors can shoehorn into the box, and how fast they can make those services run while keeping the price reasonable. Keep watching. We’ll be running the new Intel NAS Performance Toolkit against a whole slew of SMB filers in the coming weeks so that we can start lining them up on the proverbial level playing field.
