Network Appliance this week plans to announce its entry into the small and midsize business market, with a storage array designed to work in network-attached, iSCSI and Fibre Channel environments.

The StoreVault S500, which starts at $5,000, has features typically found in high-end storage systems. It has as much as 6TB of storage capacity, features Windows-based configuration software and includes built-in data-protection software that lets as many as 250 snapshots of data to be taken. The product also features Network Appliance's RAID Double Parity, which is used to recover data if more than one disk fails at a time.

"You can find [network-attached storage] and [storage-area network] offerings out there, but with Network Appliance it's the same NAS and SAN kernel used in its bigger boxes," says Chuck Edwards, managing partner for Blue Gecko, a provider of hosting and managed service in Seattle. "It's a wonderful way for us to provide high-end features to our customers at a small cost."

The S500 supports the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and QLogic's Simple SAN initiative, which uses QLogic host bus adapters to connect Windows servers to the SAN. An optional host bus adapter is offered from Silverback Systems, which speeds iSCSI and offloads server processing. The array features either 250G or 500GB Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives, which can be added or removed from the array without disrupting operations.

The S500 will compete with arrays from EMC, HP, Snap Server and Dell. Unlike these arrays, which attach only to the network as iSCSI, network-attached or Fibre Channel devices, the S500 connects as all three. It also supports about four times as many snapshots as comparable arrays.

The new offering is to be made available exclusively through Tech Data. The Fibre Channel support is due in September.