Netgear today announced details about new wireless access management, switching, and storage products which Netgear is positioning to provide scalability for mid-sized organizations. According to Netgear, the company’s ProSAFE M6100 switches, ProSAFE WC9500 wireless controllers, and the ReadyNAS 3130 series of appliances are focused on higher-density environments such as mid-sized business or school and medical campus deployments which expect to scale their infrastructures.
Netgear today announced details about new wireless access management, switching, and storage products which Netgear is positioning to provide scalability for mid-sized organizations. According to Netgear, the company’s ProSAFE M6100 switches, ProSAFE WC9500 wireless controllers, and the ReadyNAS 3130 series of appliances are focused on higher-density environments such as mid-sized business or school and medical campus deployments which expect to scale their infrastructures.
ProSAFE M6100 Chassis Series
Netgear is billing the ProSAFE M6100 chassis series as the world’s first 4U all-in-one Gigabit and 10G chassis priced under $8,000. The M6100 series “distributed fabric” architecture allows the M6100 switches to operate without a dedicated supervisory module while still offering passive backplane, hitless failover, and redundant management functionality along with 1.4Tbps of switching and routing capacity.
Each of the M6100’s blade slots provides 2 x 40G access to the passive backplane (80G half-duplex; 160G full-duplex). The M6100 Chassis Series can be configured with up to 144-ports for gigabit Ethernet or 72-port 10G Ethernet ports. As part of the launch, Netgear has announced a ProSAFE M6100 Starter Kit as a turnkey solution that incorporates:
- 1 x M6100-3S base chassis (XCM8903)
- 1 x blade 40x1G + 4x10G (XCM8944)
- 1 x PoE+ daughter card (XCM89P)
- 1 x power supply unit (APS1000W)
- 1 x fan tray front to back (AFT603)
The ProSAFE M6100’s architecture allows the switch to be used as either the highly redundant core of a small business network or to be purposed as an uplink and access solution for larger organizations. Each the M6100’s I/O blades are equipped with the dedicated hardware and software to direct its distributed fabric management features, meaning that whichever blade is installed in the first blade slot handles supervisor functions, and whichever blade has been installed in the second slot handles the back-up supervisor role.
Each M6100 incorporates its own power supply and redundant power system with centralized power management in order to allow the chassis PSU to be dynamically allocated to any blade. This results in a power system that requires fewer total power supplies than stackable switches and the ability to incorporate N+1 failover.
ProSAFE WC9500 Premium Wireless Controller
The ProSAFE WC9500 Premium Wireless Controller is designed to support the company’s lineup of ProSAFE Managed Access Points as part of a scalable solution that can manage up to 200 access points per controller in a stacked arrangement. Using a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ access point-based licensing model, the WC9500 can support up to 600 signal-band and dual-band access points when deployed as a stack of three controllers.
The new controller leverages the Ufast protocol for access point discovery and offers Layer 2 and Layer 3 fast roaming, captive portal functionality, distributed architecture, and dynamic RF management. The WC9500 also incorporates 802.11ac support.
ReadyNAS 3130 Series
The new ReadyNAS 3130 Series Network Attached Storage appliances will be available in a 4-bay, 1U form factor with a maximum capacity 24TB and four gigabit Ethernet ports. The 3130 Series supports up to 200 simultaneous users and was engineered to support iSCSI for virtualized workloads. The 3130 ships with ReadyNAS OS 6.2, which incorporates Netgear’s data protection, backup, sync, and cloud-based management technology. ReadyNAS OS 6.2 offers snapshots, thin provisioning, and cloud-managed replication.
Pricing and Availability
The ProSAFE M6100 Chassis Series Starter Kit is available now at $7,990. The ProSAFE WC9500 Premium Wireless Controller is now available at $5,999 and 10 access point licenses for $1056. Both the M6100 and the WC9500 include Netgear’s lifetime hardware warranty and lifetime 24×7 technical support with next day business shipping for part replacements.
The ReadyNAS is available in a diskless edition at $1,499 and is offered with a 5-year limited hardware warranty with 5 years of next day shipping for part replacement and lifetime 24×7 technical support.
ProSAFE WC9500 Wireless Controller
Update: Our review of the ProSAFE M6100 Chassis Series
