Cisco’s NSS 300 Series devices present an attractive alternative to larger-ticket solutions for multiterabyte data storage. The NSS 300 Series was designed for environments of up to 100 users; include energy-saving features; behave as network-attached storage for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows clients; and offer a number of applications such as backup, file, media and Web services. They can also act as an iSCSI target in clustered and virtualized environments. The devices offer a plethora of connectivity, with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, two eSATA ports and four USB ports in back, with a fifth USB port on the front of the device. A number of built-in applications extend the usefulness of the NSS 300 Series devices, such as a built-in RADIUS server for user authentication and a syslog server that can collect log data from other networked devices. The Web server includes an integrated WordPress publishing platform, and the Twonky and iTunes media servers are part of the basic software. – …