NetGear Acquires Small NAS Vendor

This acquisition should be a good move to strengthen NetGear's presence in the rapidly growing SMB networked storage market. Infrant's inexpensive ReadyNAS held up surprisingly well in our April 2006 Low-cost NAS review and our testing showed that Infrant was a small storage company with some really good ideas. NetGear's purchase of Infrant should move them up a click in the SMB storage food chain, and the technology transfer will save them a chunk of R&D cash that they would otherwise need to develop their own RAID 5 and higher NAS devices. Steven Hill Technology Editor

NetGear acquired privately held Infrant Technologies, gaining capabilities to address the growing small enterprise storage market.

NetGear paid $60 million in cash for Infrant, whose ReadyNAS family of network attached storage (NAS) products implements redundant array of independent disks (RAID) data protection. Infrant's products target small enterprises, providing enterprise-level storage option.

The ReadyNAS lineup runs on Infrant's proprietary network storage processor, Linux-based RAIDiator OS and Expandable Protection (X-RAID) technology, which allows for automatic RAID volume expansion as additional drives are added.