David,,,the word is because David Sackler of COBN has taken his sweet time in bringing the financials current. The deal may be in jeopardy. I'll continue to watch this one but what was once a 95% chance of a merger (in my book) has now been reduced to a 50/50 crap roll. And it's really too bad. US Modular has the potenial and talent to make it to NASD:
US Modular Debuts NAS
byteandswitch.com;
IRVINE, Calif. -- US Modular, a designer and manufacturer of personal memory and storage products, today announced the availability of the world's most power-efficient NAS on the market. The newly developed TeraNAS 1U takes all the features an enterprise storage processor would deliver, but without the high price tag and inoperability of most enterprise storage solutions. The TeraNAS 1U is currently shipping and when in operation, consumes less than 100W of power when using four disks.
"We took everything we were doing in personal storage; delivering small form factors in higher capacities for a lower price point, and put that same model into our enterprise solution," said US Modular Managing Director Nick Payzant. "The TeraNAS 1U is seamless, powerful and revolutionary and the only compact rack-mount storage processor at this price."
With four hot pluggable Serial ATA (SATA) disks, the TeraNAS 1U is capable of instantly providing up to 2.0 terabytes of storage with options for RAID levels 0, 1 and 5. Designed to work with cross-platform data sharing support for Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, Web browsers and FTP clients, the TeraNAS 1U is designed for immediate manageability, interoperability, and compatibility, with existing Windows domain and Active Directory Service. This allows seamless and secure integration to existing network users.
To keep costs at an all-time low, US Modular embedded RAIDiator(TM) OS into the TeraNAS 1U solution. This allows any number of users without incurring additional license fees. The RAIDiator(TM) embedded operating system makes set-up a breeze. Security monitoring, data journaling, better redundancy and more are all enhanced and easily customizable according to the user. Once set up, the built-in alert system constantly monitors the health of the device and any failure or warning condition is reported immediately.
fter competing in the market for low-end NAS devices designed for SMB, SOHO, and even home users over the past couple of years, US Modular is moving its NAS upscale (see SMBs Get Their Backup, Storage Goes Home, and US Modular Debuts NAS ).
The vendor today announced its TeraNAS 1U NAS, which it bills as an “enterprise solution” priced at $3,995 for 2 Tbytes.
Of course, "enterprise" is a relative term. US Modular is going after departments of large organizations, as well as SMBs that have room for rackmounted storage. For smaller companies, US Modular has a NAS Cube -- a toaster-sized appliance similar to home and SOHO boxes from Anthology Solutions Inc. and Netgear Inc.
US Modular CEO Nick Payzant resists the idea that the TeraNAS 1U is designed for consumer-type applications like video and digital photo storage. He’ll leave that to vendors such as Buffalo Technology, Iomega Corp. (NYSE: IOM - message board), Maxtor Corp. (NYSE: MXO - message board), and NetGear.
TeraNAS uses a 32-bit RISC processor and supports up to four 500-Gbyte SATA drives and RAID 0, 5, and 1. The system lets users share files across Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix operating systems. It supports snapshots, and the drives are hot-swappable for high availability. Payzant hopes to add wireless capability down the road.
The TeraNAS brings US Modular into competition with Windows-based NAS from Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL - message board) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ - message board). Payzant hopes to win on price. For instance, 1.2-Tbyte systems from Dell PowerVault and HP ProLiant NAS cost about the same as the 2-Tbyte TeraNAS.
Of course, US Modular isn’t selling direct against Dell and HP. It has a distributor deal with Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM - message board) and a VAR network.
Payzant says the five-year-old company, which has 55 employees, started out selling PC memory and flash cards and evolved into NAS. This may be as far as US Modular goes for networked storage. “I’ll never say never, but we have no plans to get into SANs,” he says.
Mum's the word on financing. Payzant says, however, that the Irvine, Calif.-based company is profitable.
— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch |
