Network Appliance is expected to announce a new low-end network-attached storage (NAS) appliance before the end of this month, sources say.

While the new FAS2000 series is designed for small and midsize businesses, it incorporates enterprise technologies, such as Fibre Channel and iSCSI functionality, as well as the use of Serial Attached SCSI disk drives. Further, it uses the Data OnTAP operating system and supports Fibre Channel and Serial ATA disk drives and is upgradeable to FAS3000 and FAS6000 file servers.

The FAS2000 series consists of two models – the FAS2050 and the FAS2020. The FAS2050 has a total capacity of 69TB and supports 104 nonremovable disks. The FAS2020 has an upwards capacity of 24TB and supports 40 nonremovable disks. The FAS2050 has four Fibre Channel and four Gigabit Ethernet connections to the network; the smaller FAS2020 has two of each. Each model supports 1GB of memory.

The FAS2000 series is expected to replace the FAS270, which was first introduced in 2002 and which has an upwards capacity of 16TB and 56 drives.

Like other NetApp filers, the FAS2000 series supports Microsoft’s Common Internet File System, the Unix/Linux Network File System, the Fibre Channel Protocol, iSCSI, HTTP, FTP and TFTP. It also supports the Network Data Management Protocol, which controls the backup of heterogeneous devices.

Although Network Appliance declined to comment on the new appliances, sources indicate that the systems will ship to customers in September.