NETGEAR ReadyNAS: VMware Certified

Netgear says its entire fleet of ReadyNAS family has earned the “VMware Ready” stamp of approval. VARs working with Netgear and looking at virtualization might want to read on…

Yes, the recently announced ReadyNAS 3100 and ReadyNAS 4200, all passed the “rigorous VMware testing for the NFS and now the iSCSI protocols.”

Drew Meyer, director of storage product marketing for NETGEAR’s Network Storage Business Unit, offered some prepared perspective:

“As a result, our channel partners can deliver trusted virtualization solutions for as little as $1,000.”

But okay, what does “VMware Ready” really mean? Is it a rubber stamp that gets thrown on after a few benchmarks? No.

Apparently it’s tougher than that: There’s testing, stringent interoperability criteria and complete testing in production environments. What’s more, the testing isn’t done by VMware themselves, but an outside party, AppLabs.

So why use Netgear’s ReadyNAS then?

ReadyNAS comes in 4 bay and 6 bay desktop configurations, and up to 12 bay in 2U rack mounted models. Pricing starts at under $1,000. All the devices have a unified storage architecture, secure replication and off-site storage archiving options. If you’re a PowerShift partner, you can get your hands on the ReadyNAS 3100 and 4200 in late April.

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