Anthology Solutions Yellow Machine P400T

For a small business with a handful of computer systems to look after, serious network attached storage (NAS) backup solutions may not be a high priority due to their cost and the implementation expertise required.

For less than $2300, Anthology Solutions' Yellow Machine P400T Server offers 1 terabyte of storage, and it simply plugs into any DHCP-enabled network and shows up as just another drive on the network.

To facilitate backups, it ships with EMC Retrospect software, which can be installed in client and host mode. You can install the client software on all the machines in your network and then control those clients from a host computer running the full version of Retrospect. Backups can be scheduled for each individual client on your network, or they can be initiated manually from the host computer to store a copy of their data on the Yellow Machine. This method of backing up and restoring files worked flawlessly in our tests, although it was slow over a 10/100 connection as we piled on the test data. Physically, the Yellow Machine looks like a tiny, bright yellow, tower PC and it has status lights on the front to inform you of any drive failures. On the inside, four IDE drives are connected in a RAID 0 configuration, for maximum capacity.

The machine also supports RAID levels 1, 1+0, 5 and JBOD and it has a built-in 8-port switch (it does not have a built-in DHCP server), Dynamic DNS support, FTP and VPN services. A WAN port facilitates a direct Internet connection through an ADSL or cable modem.