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  • Origin Storage 15:24 on 18/07/2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , NAS Server, , , ,   

    Over £300 reduction on the Thecus N12000 

    Origin Storage are now offering a massive £300.00 + saving on the Thecus N12000 12 Bay  Enterprise NAS Storage server , as well as offering this saving on the bare unit the discount also applies to the 12TB, 24TB & 36TB Vesrions, offering exceptional value for such a well rounded system,  which offers an Intel Xeon X3470 2.93GHz processor, 8GB DD3 SDRAM, iSCSI 3 support, up to 48TB of storage and a unprecedented  5 Year warranty

    As well as the massive savings Origin Storage is also offering a £50.00 Play.com voucher for every Thecus N12000 unit purchased.

    Want more Info…. see whay PC Pro had to say about the N12000

    As Thecus’s venture into the large enterprise NAS market continues, there is more and more evidence that they are doing it right. After other excellent reviews across the world, the N12000 received a recommendation from one of the well respected electronics publications PC PRO. Dave Mitchell tested the N12000 in his high-tech lab and got stellar results, earning the N12000 5 out of 6 stars and his seal of approval.

    Thecus’s support for SAS drives gives them a leg up: “Despite the proliferation of small business NAS appliances, only Thecus has made any effort to support SAS drives. It went on the offensive with the excellent N7700 and now ups the ante with its rack mount N12000 – the first in this sector to support the latest 6Gbits/sec SAS drives.”

    The hardware is sturdy and innovative: “The N12000 is a solidly built system, with a sturdy flip-down panel hiding the drive bays, the power and reset buttons, and an OLED display and control pad. It also hides two USB 2 ports, with four more at the back…The motherboard design has allowed Thecus to be imaginative with features. Rather than use a riser it has three low-profile PCI Express slots, with the first occupied by a dual-port USB 3 adapter. One of the motherboard’s SATA interfaces has been cabled out to the back using an eSATA header card.”

    A wide range of functionality is as vital as performance: “IP SAN features are good. Thecus supports thin provisioning, which lets you create high capacity virtual volumes that start small and have blocks dynamically allocated as they grow in size. Performance is excellent, with Iometer reporting a high raw read speed of 110MB/sec for a 50GB target.”

    Acronis’ supplies first-rate backup options to protect your data: “For backup, the price includes five copies of Acronis’ Backup and Recovery 10 for Windows Servers. Once you’ve created a vault on the appliance, backups of selected disks or volumes on the server can be run at daily, weekly and monthly intervals…Along with g ood data restoration features, Acronis provides plenty of disaster recovery tools. You can create a boot disk and enable the Startup Recovery Manager feature, which adds an option to the boot-up sequence allowing the server to run a recovery environment for bare metal restores.”

    Thecus is making big strides in the market: “By combining plenty of business related features with a decent server backup package, the N12000 moves Thecus into the big league for network storage. The 6Gbits/sec SAS drives deliver fine performance, it’s 10-Gigabit ready and it looks [like a] good value too.”

    Contact Origin Storage Today on 0844 288 6868 

     email sales@originstorage.com

     

  • Origin Storage 10:32 on 29/06/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 10GbE, 12-bay NAS, , NAS Server, , ,   

    Thecus N12000 moves up a gear with support for 6Gbits/sec SAS drives, fine performance and a good range of business network storage features 

    Despite the proliferation of small business NAS appliances, only Thecus has made any effort to support SAS drives. It went on the offensive with the excellent N7700 and now ups the ante with its rack mount N12000 – the first in this sector to support the latest 6Gbits/sec SAS drives.

    Supplied to us by Origin Storage, the N12000 is a 2U rack chassis with room for up to twelve hot-swap drives. The price above includes six 600GB Seagate Cheetah 6Gbits/sec SAS drives, but Origin also offers near-line SAS and SATA drives if capacity is a higher priority than performance.

    The N12000 is a solidly built system, with a sturdy flip-down panel hiding the drive bays, the power and reset buttons, and an OLED display and control pad. It also hides two USB 2 ports, with four more at the back.

    The motherboard design has allowed Thecus to be imaginative with features. Rather than use a riser it has three low-profile PCI Express slots, with the first occupied by a dual-port USB 3 adapter. One of the motherboard’s SATA interfaces has been cabled out to the back using an eSATA header card. However, Thecus doesn’t currently offer any expansion shelves.

    The drives are handled by an LSI SAS PCI Express card, and the appliance is 10-Gigabit ready. Origin offers a single-port Intel X520-SR1 card for £799 and a dual-port SR2 card for £999. Two Gigabit data ports are provided, and a third is used as a heartbeat link to another N12000 for high availability (HA). Thecus currently supports HA for single-array systems but it aims to support HA for multiple arrays in the coming months.

    Installation is little different to Thecus’ desktop units: a Setup Wizard finds the appliance on the network and provides quick access to the main Ajax-based web console. A substantial redesign makes features a lot more accessible.


    For testing we chose to place all six SAS drives in a single RAID5 array. You can’t access any services while it’s building, and the array took just over two hours to create.

    With a fast 2.93GHz Intel Xeon X3470 processor and 4GB of DDR3, the N12000 delivered a top performance in our lab tests. Using a Broadberry dual-X5560 rack server running Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit, drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read and write speeds of 103MB/sec. The FileZilla FTP client reported averages of 103MB/sec for uploads and downloads, while our 17.4GB collection of 10,500 files copied to the appliance at a rate of 71MB/sec.

    The N12000 supports link aggregation, so we bundled the two Gigabit ports into an 802.3ad LACP dynamic link, which our HP Procurve 2848 switch spotted and automatically created for us. Partnering the X5560 server with a Dell PowerEdge R515 server, we mapped separate shares to each one from the RAID array and saw Iometer report a cumulative raw read speed of 219MB/sec.

    IP SAN features are good. Thecus supports thin provisioning, which lets you create high capacity virtual volumes that start small and have blocks dynamically allocated as they grow in size. Performance is excellent, with Iometer reporting a high raw read speed of 110MB/sec for a 50GB target.

    For backup, the price includes five copies of Acronis’ Backup and Recovery 10 for Windows Servers. Once you’ve created a vault on the appliance, backups of selected disks or volumes on the server can be run at daily, weekly and monthly intervals

    Along with good data restoration features, Acronis provides plenty of disaster recovery tools. You can create a boot disk and enable the Startup Recovery Manager feature, which adds an option to the boot-up sequence allowing the server to run a recovery environment for bare metal restores.

    The appliance’s OS is protected by Thecus’s dual-DOMs. The second DOM maintains a backup copy that’s called up if the primary one fails, and you can schedule backups to be run regularly.

    Other backup options include support for Rsync, where the appliance acts as a target for other appliances. A free add-on module allows it to replicate to other targets, and Thecus has another that enables scheduling of folder backups on the appliance to local USB and eSATA devices.

    As with Netgear’s ReadyNAS 4200, Thecus doesn’t offer any expansion capabilities so you can’t daisy-chain JBOD units from the main chassis. However, its Stackable feature does allow you to declare iSCSI targets on other Thecus appliances to the N1200, which can then export them as network shares.

    By combining plenty of business related features with a decent server backup package, the N12000 moves Thecus into the big league for network storage. The 6Gbits/sec SAS drives deliver fine performance, it’s 10-Gigabit ready and it looks good value too.

     

  • Origin Storage 14:10 on 15/06/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Home NAS, , , , , , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , PC Magazine, , , , , , , , , ,   

    The Thecus N4200PRO Shows Its Power in PC Mag 

    The Thecus N4200PRO beat competitors on several crucial parameters!

    A new review of several NAS systems by PC Magazine Russian Edition is now available. Of course, the Thecus N4200PRO got a lot of attention! According to the results of the testing, it not only catches up with the competitors, but overcomes them on several parameters such as the all important reading and writing speeds.

    “According to the SiSoftware Sandra Lite test, this NAS demonstrates up to 52 MB/sec reading and 72 MB/sec writing speed. At the same time, with the HD Playback and Recording test using Intel’s NAS Performance Toolkit the speed goes up to 79 MB/sec.”

    PC Magazine mentioned that in comparison with its predecessor the N4100PRO, which was tested last year, the N4200PRO is a more modern device showing outstanding results: “The N4200PRO is based on the Intel Atom D525 processor with 1 GB DDR-3 SDRAM. The performance of the processor and RAM are especially important in such small and medium NAS because they usually don’t come with high-performance RAID controllers. Therefore, all computing loading associated with dynamic location of data falls on the shoulders of the processor.”

    This model has several major differences which makes it special and are highlighted in the review: “We should point out such special features as a free PCI-e port, a special place for a small [included] back-up battery that either allows the NAS to survive temporary electricity blackouts without any damage to the data or shuts the system down when electricity does not return, and readiness to work with WiFi adapter.”

    Besides great features in the internal design of the N4200PRO, its external design stands out as well: “The N4200PRO is reminiscent of its predecessor in the way it looks, but there are not many other similarities in the current technical solution. The N4100PRO’s LCD display is replaced by a 2.8’’ OLED display, and instead of LED indicators on the left side we now see an LCD display showing the NAS’s network activity and disk operation status.”

    Finally, PC Magazine loved the way the N4200PRO looks: “The design of this NAS is impeccable. Its professional looking housing, large and quiet 120 mm fan, two eSATA and four USB 2.0 ports are quite enough for even medium enterprises.”

    PC Magazine concluded that the N4200PRO together with the modules is a great solution at a modest price: “The N4200PRO coupled with modules downloadable from the Thecus website and a great price can be considered a good choice as a centralized storage solution for home and office use.”

    To explore the Thecus N4200PRO further, click here.

    To explore the complete range of Thecus products, click here.

     

  • Origin Storage 15:54 on 26/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , , , , , , , ,   

    Tweak.dk Loves the Thecus N4200PRO’s Power, Functions 

    Tweak.dk has long been one of the leading NAS review experts in Europe. After testing the N4200, they were eager to get a hold of its successor, the N4200PRO. With a new Intel Atom D525 processor and 1GB DDR3 SDRAM, it promised to give tremendous results, and it did. This test also comes just after the release of Thecus’s Firmware V5, giving Tweak.dk a first look at all it has to offer: 3TB HDD support, EXT4 support, a great help feature in the UI, a new photo server called Piczza!, and much more.

    The N4200PRO shares one excellent feature with its predecessor; the Mini-UPS backup battery: “…just because you have all your data on a NAS server does not mean that it is secured. Should the power go as you are writing something, there is a real risk that data could be lost. This is where the battery takes over and makes sure that the NAS box is properly shut down.”

    The Firmware V5 UI is much improved in many areas: “Since V5, Thecus has however cleared up the menu and it has improved. As something new, they added a Help button. If you do not quite know what a menu is doing and what different options do, you can press the Help button and you get an explanation.”

    Firmware V5 continues the Thecus-exclusive module system with the new freedom of open source modules: “Thecus N4200Pro comes preloaded with the most basic needs. If you would like any additional services/programs such as Web server, you can install it when needed. With V5 of Thecus’s firmware it is now open source, and hence we can go in and create specific programs for our own needs.”

    The Piczza! photo server is a great addition to Thecus’s software lineup: “Piczza! is quite an upgrade from their photo server. Not only is it much more intuitive, it can also do more. It recognizes me as a user, and you can now upload pictures and choose who can see them. Images can also be tagged so you can easily navigate through the images.”

    To support all of these great features, the performance is top-notch: “The new Intel Pentium D525 processor, DDR3 RAM, and V5 firmware gives the N4200PRO a proper notch up in speed. The N4200 was in itself a fast NAS with speeds lying between 60 and 80 MB/s. But the new N4200PRO pushes performance to the top of what you find on the market, with not less than 90 – 100MB/s it is also in the top of what we here at Tweak.dk have experienced.”

    All in all, there were eight major factors that sets the N4200PRO apart from the competition:

    • Performance
    • Built-in UPS (battery)
    • Support for both 2.5 “and 3.5″ HDD
    • OLED display
    • Construction Quality
    • Connectivity
    • Price – due to included Mini-UPS backup battery
    • WOL (Wake On LAN)

    To check out all the information on the Thecus N4200PRO, click here.

    To view more of the Thecus range we have at Origin Storage, click here.

     

  • Origin Storage 08:57 on 25/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: APC Magazine, , , , , , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , , , ,   

    APC Awards the Thecus N4200PRO for its 9/10 Score! 

    “…The N4200PRO has nearly every feature under the sun.”

    APC Magazine recently looked at the Thecus D0204 with glowing results, so they decided to take a gander at a more serious product, the Thecus N4200PRO NAS. This NAS features the Thecus-exclusive Mini-UPS backup battery, Dual DOM protection, a slew of features, and power to spare. APC took it through its paces and was impressed enough with the results to give the N4200PRO a 9/10 and their elusive “Editor’s Choice” award.

    The Thecus N4200PRO showcases a revolutionary Thecus-exclusive feature in NAS data protection, the Mini-UPS backup battery: “The Thecus 4-bay N4200PRO has a unique feature not seen in any of the other devices we’ve seen. It has its own Li-Ion battery backup in case of power loss. Built in to the unit is a small battery, which will give you enough time to gracefully shut down the NAS should the power go out (it’s automatic, so you don’t need to race and hit the button). When you’re dealing with your essential business data, you want this kind of functionality to ensure its protection.”

    Beyond the Mini-UPS, Thecus data protection shows its deep bench: “Beyond the nifty battery trick, the N4200PRO has nearly every feature under the sun. The unit supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 and JBOD, with auto rebuild, hot spare and hot-swap support on its server-style lockable drive bays.”

    Performance comes first, last, and always: “Perhaps of most importance is the unit’s performance on the bench. Our testing showed the N4200PRO capable of storing data in our write test at a huge 47MB/s and reading it back at a very respectable 52MB/s,. This level of performance is more than adequate for any small business.”

    To explore more information on the N4200PRO, please click here.

    To explore other Thecus products at Origin Storage, please click here.

     

  • Origin Storage 12:41 on 24/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , , , ,   

    Which NAS Names the Thecus N16000 the New Best 

    “…Move over competitors, Thecus has arrived.”

    Thecus has recently ventured into the Enterprise NAS industry with the N16000 and N12000 NAS and high hopes for both. This move was the result of Thecus’s widespread success in the home and SMB NAS markets and the ability to apply that knowledge gleaned from years of strong products to the next level up. The reviews are just beginning to come in and the results are better than even the most positive soothsayers’ predictions. WhichNAS praised the N16000 as the best in class with a price placing it squarely at the bottom. They finished it off with their coveted “Excellence” award for across the board brilliance in service, support, features, design, performance, and price.

    The N16000 in a nutshell: “The Thecus N16000 is a well rounded product that embodies all that is needed in an entry level enterprise NAS that has capacity to satisfy any need. The recent advent of 3TBG drives allows the N16000 to boost its gross capacity support to 48TB, its not short on expansion, with 8GB memory and an excellent turn of performance the best we have seen thus far, there is very little not to like about the N16000. Thecus has upgraded its warranty offering to 5-years and with that the Thecus N16000 easily has the top value for money and performance ratio currently available on the market.”

    The best performance recorded…ever…and value to boot: “The Thecus N16000 does not disappoint in the area of performance with 8GB of memory. It will most certainly be a real advantage when deployed as a Virtual storage appliance. The N16000 did exceptionally well in the Copy, Backup and Restore sections returning one of the fastest scores we have seen thus far. If performance and value for money is the combination you are looking for then the Thecus N16000 will aptly meet your needs.”

    The N16000 has serious enterprise features not found in its class: “Another feature is the Virtual user support with VMware, Hyper V and Citrix ready and compatibility across all platforms for users of Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX. The unit is well suited for medium to large size businesses as well…The salient features that impressed us were the remote replication, the ease of expanding the capacity of the drives, RAID set on the fly and the encryption to the RAID volume…The one feature that stood out for us was High Availability (HA) which can actively keep data on two separate but identical NAS devices. This way there is one system that is always up no matter what happens, aside from disaster hitting both places! Highly unlikely.”

    To wrap it up nicely – Game Over: “The Thecus N16000 shows how it really should be done, it has it all, bleeding edge performance, high specification, excellent warranty, and a massive capacity booster, it seems this model and the N12000 will allow Thecus to dominate this sector for a while, most certainly sounds like its saying, move over competitors, Thecus has arrived.”

    To discover more about the Thecus N16000, please click here.

    For more information on other Thecus products at Origin Storage, please click here.

     

  • Origin Storage 09:36 on 11/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , In-Stat, , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , , , ,   

    Breaking News: Thecus NAS #1 in Asia, #6 Worldwide 

    Strong products and aggressive expansion paves the way to greatness in the electronics industry, and with NAS it is no different. In the past year, Thecus has made many steps in the right direction, capturing the public eye in both the private and enterprise sectors with a mix of performance and economy products featuring developments that simply aren’t offered from other companies. The home/SMB XXX series, new enterprise series featuring high performance 12- and 16-bay NAS, a never before seen Mini-UPS backup battery, Dual DOM system protection, and being the first to equip NAS with High Availability architecture and 10G BASE-T high-speed Ethernet are some major reasons why Thecus has moved way up in the worldwide market.

    Worldwide leader in statistical market analysis In-Stat has found that Thecus leaped right over D-Link and HP from the #8 to the #6 position in worldwide NAS market share rankings. It also assumed the role of the #1 NAS provider in Asia as well as the #1 provider of Intel-based NAS worldwide. The 109,800 units sold gives Thecus 29% growth in sales from 2009 to 2010, a massive expansion even by the most modest standards.

    Thecus stands in a league of its own, being the only pure NAS producer among the top 11 worldwide. The others are a mix of computer and storage companies with products ranging from mobile devices all the way to printers. This focus gives Thecus and their users an advantage and it shows. Even without the massive marketing budgets and slick salespeople, Thecus has taken ground the old fashion way. Satisfied customers speak louder than ad campaigns, and Thecus is moving on up!

    To explore more of the Thecus product range available at Origin Storage click here.

     

  • Origin Storage 14:26 on 09/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , NAS Server, , , , PC World, , , , , ,   

    PC World Gets Its First Look at the Thecus N4200PRO 

    “The Thecus N4200PRO combines good performance with some unique features.”

    PC World of Norway got a chance to look at the N4200PRO firsthand and put it through their speed test. The results were quite impressive, leaving the N4200PRO with some of the fastest speeds on the market, excellent new support with the new firmware upgrade, and a couple of quirks that really make it stand out: the Mini-UPS and Dual-DOM design.

    Only Thecus has a hardware backup of the system software on an extra flash disk: “Thecus has an extra element here – the [system] configuration is stored on a separate flash memory in case there is a physical error on the primary [flash drive].”

    The Thecus-exclusive Mini-UPS is a fantastic and innovative addition: “A feature unique to Thecus is that some models are available with an integrated UPS. This is a battery installed in the device that ensures that the data contained in the write buffer is written to the disk before the device turns off should the power be cut off…Using a UPS to deliver a controlled shutdown during a power failure is really recommended for all server solutions, but for home and small business, there are many who do not have a solution – the integrated battery can therefore be a good idea.”

    Software functionality is excellent: “When it comes to other software-based functionality, Thecus offers a relatively large amount. Also Thecus can provide iSCSI support, UPnP AV streaming server, iTunes server, FTP server, Web-based access to files and more.”

    Firmware V5 brings Thecus’s new Piczza! photo server and EXT4 support among others: “In the latest version of the software, which comes as an upgrade soon to a number of Thecus NAS’s, comes with a better solution for Web-based photo albums. It will also put into place support for the EXT4 file system, which should give better performance.”

    The performance is top-notch placing at the top of the market: “Performance-wise the device delivers very good numbers…In file transfer, we had read performance in excess of 100 megabytes per second and write performance of nearly 90 megabytes per second. Also transferring small files we see very good numbers in some areas…”

    See the full review here: http://www.idg.no/pcworld/tester/nettverk/article198042.ece

    For more information on the N4200PRO, check out:

    http://www.originstorage.com/thecus_n4200pro_details.asp

    For more information on our Thecus product range, go to:

    http://www.originstorage.com/Products_Thecus_nas.asp

     

  • Origin Storage 12:01 on 05/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Firmware V5, , , , , NAS Server, , , , , , , , , , , , , Tutorial, , , YouTube   

    Video Tutorial: Discover Thecus Firmware V5 

    Taipei (Taiwan): When you invest in a new NAS, you expect to use it to its full potential. To help you in this task, Thecus often provides tutorials: written ones or, more recently, videos. For the release of Firmware V5, we’re very happy to invite you to have a seat in the Thecus classroom and learn a bit more about all the wonderful possibilities this new version offers.

    The video starts with a small introduction about what’s new, which is followed by a live demo of the new UI. There’s even a short recap quiz to make sure you got everything. Be careful, some questions are tricky!

    What’s going to be introduced in the video?

    First of all, there is a quick overview about some obvious changes in V5, such as appearance, a wider screen, and easier access to shortcuts. All of those small changes are here to simplify your experience and help you save time. Then the guide turns to details about the brand new search bar (which works in every language!) and help menu. It’s really convenient: just type in whatever you’re looking for and you’ll be there in less than two clicks. If you are lost, just hit the help button to learn everything about the current page.

    Finally the new AMI (Auto Module Installation) function is introduced. Ushering in a brand new era for Thecus users, this small feature allows you to install/uninstall/upgrade every module in a click. You can tailor your NAS according to your needs in a heartbeat!

    Discover more about our Thecus product range here.

     

  • Origin Storage 10:45 on 04/05/2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , BitTorrent, , , , , , NAS Server, , , , Piczza, , , Software Development Kit, , , , , , Thecus SDK, , WebDisk   

    A New Era for Developers with the Thecus SDK 

    The freedom and customization of open source software for all Thecus users

    Thecus has always been very proud of its hardware. However, their components are getting very, very powerful and offer users almost unlimited possibilities. Thanks to many partners’ feedback (users, journalists, distributors, etc.) Thecus has come along with their newest project: the Thecus Software Development Kit (SDK). The beta version is already available.

    What is the Thecus module system?
    Basically, it’s very similar to a smartphone apps system, but for your NAS! Browse directly from your NAS among official modules or download the one you want from a third party website. You can then install, uninstall, or upgrade it in a couple of clicks thanks to the new V5 auto module installation page.

    This module system has been designed to maximize the number of available functions while minimizing the load: just install whatever you need and your NAS will possesses exactly what you asked for! No more, no less. Available modules can already unlock several excellent NAS functions: the Piczza! photo server, a WebDisk client, the Transmission Bittorrent client, a mail server, and many more.

    What’s the Thecus SDK?
    Even if Thecus is developing a dozen official – and free – modules, a single company can’t match the infinite innovative potential of the whole Thecus community. The Thecus SDK includes a lot of useful tools that can be used by developers in order to code their own modules for Firmware V5 and above. It includes a toolchain, guides for beginners and experts, example code, and a framework from which to build.

    This SDK is currently in an open beta phase and will be evolving thanks to your feedback!

    How is Thecus going to support the community?
    Sharing is valued very highly by Thecus. A dedicated forum for developers has been set up where Thecus engineers and the development community will be abe to communicate their questions and suggestions. It will be a priority to improve the SDK according to users’ feedback in order to guarantee ease-of-use and efficiency. Finally, Thecus will organize events in order to promote and support this community. A little bird told me that a big module design competition is going to be launched around the same time as a certain international electronics show in Taipei…

    To discover our Thecus product range, please click here.

     

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