Western Digital announced today the WD Sentinel DX4000 NAS server for business environments.
The new four-bay server runs the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system on an Intel D525 Dual Core Atom processor.
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 is superior to the current version of Windows Home Server and offers support for RAID configurations and iSCSI, which allows a portion of the network storage to be used by a computer as if it were a local drive. Because of this, the WD Sentinel DX400 supports RAID 1 and 5.
The new server, for now, comes in two capacities, 4TB and 8TB. In addition, it has two USB 3.0 ports for hosting more storage. The server can also work as the host for a business's cloud storage. WD says the Sentinel DX4000 offers storage and automatic backup for up to 25 network computers (PC and Mac), where a server running Windows Home Server would only do so for 10.
The new server has two Gigabit network ports, which can be used together for fail-safe purposes. The server is certified to be compatible with Windows XP or later, Mac OS X 10.6 or later, and Unix/Linux operating systems.
The new WD Sentinel DX4000 is available now with the estimated prices of $950 and $1,500 for the 4TB and 8TB capacities, respectively.