Even a multi-billion dollar outfit such as Intel needs to find new pathways to tread. The giant has reorganized itself in the past year, and is looking to gain customers by offering comprehensive hardware platform solutions. Complex technologies are often easier to market in this way, and as a nice side effect, the company can also sell more chips at the same time. This also gives Intel the opportunity to sound out new business opportunities, such as networked storage - one with high growth potential.

Most SOHO and SMB users turn to DVD burners or external hard drives for backing up digital data, both of which are available in unbelievable variety. But burning DVDs gets old pretty quickly when you have hundreds of gigabytes of media and data files to archive. And while copying files over to an external drive is much more convenient, the single drive is also a single point of failure, not to mention a pain to move from computer to computer for multi-computer backup.

But both problems can be solved with networked storage, which is why NAS products continue to grow in popularity, features and capacity and also why Intel wants a piece of the action. It has chosen to enter the battle with the SS4000-E, a Linux-based, quad SATA drive, BYOD (Bring Your Own Drive), RAID 5, gigabit Ethernet NAS chassis. This flexible platform lets it play in both high-end consumer and small-biz markets, while staying clear of the inventory management problems that come with diskful NAS products.

Join our discussion on this topic