WD, a Western Digital company and leader in digital storage solutions has expanded its product portfolio addressing small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) with the addition of the WD Sentinel RX4100, its first 1U rack-mount small business storage server.
“Following the success of our first SMB storage server, the WD Sentinel DX4000, we are responding to customer and partner requests to expand our portfolio with a solution for customers that have a rack based computing infrastructure,” says Thomas Gallivan, VP of marketing for WD’s SMB solutions group.

“The WD Sentinel RX4100 delivers a unified storage solution that’s easy to install, seamlessly integrates into Windows environments with Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and offers complete data protection and secure remote access to a business’s data.”

The WD Sentinel RX4100 is a simple and affordable way for SMBs to centralise and store all of their documents and digital assets in one secure location.

While installation and setup is simple and intuitive, the product delivers enterprise-class features such as RAID protection, automatic server-based backup and restoration capabilities, redundant network and power options, as well as integrated network attached storage (NAS) functionality and iSCSI SAN capabilities for virtualised network environments.

The WD Sentinel offers a complete data protection solution and helps safeguard SMBs against data loss. WD Sentinel RX4100 comes with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system and includes the software to back-up a total of 25 licences for both Windows and Mac OS client computers in the network.

The product features pre-installed WD hard drives, optimised for reliability, quality and performance, factory configured in RAID 5 for data protection against drive failure.

Backing up and restoring stored data is automated with options for complete bare-metal backup and restoration of the entire system, as well as incremental backups and restoration for specific files. Mac OS systems can back up to WD Sentinel RX4100 using Time Machine backup utility.

In the event of an accidental data loss or computer failure, WD Sentinel’s easy restore function finds lost files, and then quickly restores them to their previous location, or allows the customers to restore the entire computer image, including the OS, program files, data and settings.

Says Anamika Budree, WD Branded sales manager – South Africa, “The WD Sentinel’s Dashboard lets you receive those critical updates via the built in email alerts functionality or view real-time updates for the systems and network status. The dashboard is easy to use and lets you perform multiple administrative tasks like creating and managing user accounts, setting up your backup schedules.”

WD Sentinel RX4100 serves as “on-premise cloud storage,” securing data in one central location in the office that can then be easily accessed from anywhere, encouraging collaboration among employees in distributed offices or among remote workers from any device via a Web browser.

WD also offers a third party disaster recovery option with KeepVault online storage that comes standard in the WD Sentinel RX4100 dashboard. WD customers can have the benefit of on-premise cloud with the WD Sentinel RX4100 as well as the safety that comes with an integrated off-site storage solution for their critical business data.

WD Sentinel RX4100 is certified to be compatible with a variety of Operating Systems (OS) including Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, as well as Mac OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion.