HYDERABAD: Seagate Technologies, a leader in computer storage market, on Wednesday launched new storage solutions aimed at small businesses having less than 50 computers.

The new suite of products, branded BlackArmor, includes three network-attached storage servers and a desktop-attached portable solution, priced between Rs. 8,000 and Rs. 1 lakh. Storage capacity ranges from 1 tera byte (TB) to 8 TB.

At a media briefing here on Wednesday, Seagate Country Manager, Rajesh Khurana, said that these new offerings were designed to optimise uptime and data integrity to meet business continuity needs of small enterprises, and offered data security, accessibility, centralised storage and crash protection.

He highlighted the BlackArmor’s interoperability which comes from the fact that hardware, software and services were all from a single company.

Within the BlackArmor suite, four are network-attached servers:

(1)   NAS 440, can handle 50 networked computers and offers 8 TB of storage and comes at a price of Rs. 99,000.

(2)   NAS 420 is similar to NAS 440 except that it has two drives in four chassis, and costs Rs. 52,500.

(3)   NAS 220 promises centralised network storage and secure remote access for up to 20 PCs. Its storage capacity is 4 TB and costs Rs. 42,000.

(4)   NAS 110 offers centralised storage and media streaming for up to 10 PCs, including server support for Windows Server 2008. It costs Rs. 19,000 for a device with a storage capacity of 2 TB, and Rs. 12,000 for the one with 1 TB.

(5)   WS 110, which is a workstation-attached storage and back-up solution for small office/home office users, offers dual interface of eSATA and USB 2.0. It costs Rs. 13,500 for a 2 TB device and Rs. 8,000 for 1 TB.

External drives were now the fastest growing segment, he said, but bare drives or the conventional PC hard drives still constituted the bulk of the company’s storage product sales.

BlackArmor products would be marketed through Seagate’s 30 channel partners. Prior to the BlackArmor, the company had Maxtor range of products in the market for this user segment.

On the impact of cloud computing on on-site storage devices, Mr. Khurana said these products would co-exist with cloud computing. Seagate had identified a market segment with unserved need before coming up with the products, he said.

For consumer segment, Seagate offers 1 TB in 2.5 inch and 2 TB in 3.5 inch disks.