Unfortunately, there's much to be desired in both the NIS and NFS functions. Integrating with an existing NIS server isn't terribly difficult, but unless it's a very simple infrastructure, you're looking at permanently modifying the Active Directory schema to incorporate hooks to permit for NFS authentication, and possibly diving into the existing NIS maps to reference accounts from NIS to AD. The simplest way to get it working is just to copy over the password and group files from a UNIX-based system, but that doesn't scale at all, and is only really usable in a small deployment. Couple these headaches with the relatively poor NFS performance, and it's best said that the NFS support in Windows Storage Server is there if you need it, but hope that you don't.

Otherwise, the NX1950 is a solid performer with the benefit of being a Windows-based system to provide a low learning curve. As a side test, I installed CentOS 4.3 on the NX1950 and configured Samba, NFS, and a few iSCSI targets. This isn't a supported configuration from Dell, so the performance numbers aren't included, but let's just say that it was faster than Windows.

All in all, for a wholly Windows-centric shop looking to provide CIFS and iSCSI services quickly, it's a good deal. You can even leverage the Windows-based OS to run printers. Just pray that you don't get spyware or a virus on your filer.

Network Appliance StoreVault S500
This product actually came as a shock to me. The heart and soul of Network Appliance is the company's Data OnTap OS platform, which runs on every storage product NetApp sells. A $250,000 SAN solution runs it, and so does the $8,000 StoreVault S500. Of course, the S500 isn't nearly in the same class at its big brothers, but it does offer the same basic functionality.

The StoreVault S500 ships with StoreVault Manager, NetApp's Windows-based management tool. With a brand-new unconfigured S500 running on the same subnet as a Windows workstation, StoreVault Manager will find it with Universal Plug and Play and walk the user through the basic configuration, including networking setup, Windows and NIS parameters, and storage configuration.

From there, it's a matter of aligning your mind to the application, configuring shares and iSCSI LUNs, and overall storage parameters. For those that haven't used a NetApp product before, this app is very useful. For those that have NetApp experience, it's actually rather annoying. Fortunately, FilerView, the Web-based management tool native to Data OnTap is also available, although the two cannot coexist.

My evaluation unit was a 3U rack-mount appliance with twelve 500GB SATA drives. It's nothing fancy from an aesthetic point of view, with a very rudimentary LED display and a few status lights. Raw capacity is about 6TB, but usable capacity falls well short of that. Eliminating two drives in a dual-parity RAID configuration and removing another for a hot spare, coupled with a reasonable snapshot reserve, actual disk size of about 415GB, and file system overhead bring the total available storage to just under 4TB, though that's a well-protected 4TB.