If you don't like SANs look away now, as recently that's what has been mainly floating our boat reviews-wise. But there's also a smartphone in there -

By Benny Har-Even, 5 Dec 2008 at 12:39

HTC has been ploughing the Windows Mobile route for a long time now, and arguably its perseverance has helped keep a struggling mobile platform alive with some decent hardware. Recently, we’ve had the Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro, but the Touch HD could be the best on of the lot, thanks to a stupendous 480 x 800 resolution as well as a host of other features. All in all though, it still failed to convince us.

Meanwhile, if your company has serious storage needs, then ProWare SB-3164E-G1A3 will have to be worth a look – our review IP SAN offered 8TB of storage for less than £5,000. For less than £5,500, that can be increased to 16TB.

One question though – where does Proware get the inspiration for its names? SB-3164E-G1A3 doesn't really get the heart all a-flutter.

If that kind of money is a bit rich, and your storage requirements are more modest, you could always try Iomega’s StorCenter Pro 200rL. It only offers 1TB of storage, but this 1U rack system will set you back less than a grand.

If you’re a Linux head, you’ll also be very excited to discover that this is Iomega’s first Linux based rack-based storage appliance – normally it goes for Windows. While this is all good, we found it overall rather lacking in the features department compared to competing products, leaving it trailing for value.

Finally, we've got British stalwart Boston serving up another SuperMicro-based IP SAN disk array in the guise of the Boston iGloo 24-T-StorMagic - complete with 24TB of storage and 10Gbe ports, the fastest Ethernet standard there is.

The solitary RAID controller is a potential point of failure, but for ten grand, what do you really expect?

www.itpro.co.uk