Last year we reviewed a new crop of network-attached storage (NAS) devices targeted at small businesses ("Storage Made Simple," December 3, 2002). If your business needs something a little more robust, consider the Iomega NAS P800m ($12,499 list) we recently tested. The price makes it reasonable for midsize businesses, and the speed and feature set are enterprise-class.

The model we tested came with dual 2.4-GHz Intel Xeon CPUs, 1GB of ECC DDR SDRAM, and eight 120GB Ultra ATA-100 hard drives (adding up to almost a terabyte of storage) in a 2U chassis. The eight hot-swappable drives come configured in RAID Level 5 for a good balance of performance and reliability, but they can also support RAID 0 or RAID 1.

The P800m runs on Windows Server with SAK (Server Appliance Kit), hence it's instantly scalable. With Microsoft's DFS, multiple Windows NAS arrays can be bound into one logical drive. Because the OS is installed on the hard drive, the P800m is less appliance-like than NASs that run an embedded Linux OS. In order to compensate for this, the P800m keeps a redundant copy of the OS.

Many of the management and administrative tools are presented through the Terminal Services client running within the Internet Explorer browser via the ActiveX control. (This means the management interface cannot be fully accessed using a Netscape browser.) An administrator versed in Windows Server could manage the NAS through the Remote Desktop interface as if it were just another Windows server.

The P800m's top cover is hinged at the middle, which makes it possible to access the hot-swappable power supplies without pulling the unit completely out of the rack. Setup was easy. Once the P800m was connected, the Iomega NAS Discovery Utility identified its IP address. If your network does not have a DHCP server, the utility lets you assign a static IP address.

On our NetBench 7.0.3 test, the P800m served up files at 250 Mbps (megabits per second) through its dual Gigabit network interfaces without breaking a sweat. The throughput peaked at 24 clients and only gradually rolled off to 200 Mbps at 56 clients. (Since NetBench is a stress test that continuously bombards the file server being tested, the load imposed by the test clients equates to a load produced by several times more clients in a real-world setting.) By comparison, the best performer in the entry-level NAS roundup peaked at 200 Mbps at 12 clients. Even more impressive was the P800m's response time, which was at worst 5 ms, even at the maximum load of 60 clients. The entry-level NASs averaged close to 25 ms at 60 clients.

So if your business needs an easy-to-configure yet robust NAS, the P800m is worth a look.