Acer AN1600 F1: A new hot-pluggable Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 appliance!

Acer comes to market with a strong storage offering of a 2U server that delivers 3.5" hot-pluggable SAS or SATA HDDs, up to 12TB SATA or 5.4TB SAS configurations running with a pair of Xeon E5620 processors. This Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 –based appliance features an LSI MegaRAID 9260-16i with 16-internal ports, supporting RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60.

Check out the product details page here: https://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/series/an1600f1

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This Acer AN1600 F1 comes with Acer utilities and Acer’s Smart Server Manager that enables RAID options that are aimed at being simple to configure. It’s great to see partners bringing storage appliances to market based on Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. If you are a proud owner of the appliance I’d love to hear your feedback about how easy it was to setup and use. I’d also like to hear how you are using SIS to dedup NTFS volumes, the iSCSI Software Target 3.3 to serve up block storage over Ethernet or using the new File Classification Infrastructure to classify files and apply policy on your file servers.

If the prognosticators tales come true, as mentioned in this CBR Online research article which explained that, “IDC expects the HDD industry to ship more petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years”. When you couple that with a recent article in Storage Magazine that indicated that “IDC research recently forecasted that file data will eclipse all other data types by a 6-to-1 ratio in terms of capacity consumption by the year 2014” it all seems to indicate to me that Storage IT teams worldwide will have many challenges in the next few years and they will need lots of resilient, reliable storage served up using both file and block protocols.

Cheers!
Scott Johnson
Windows Storage Server