Infrant is a cool company that I’ve been following for some time now as well as recommending their ReadyNAS line of products to individuals that have mass storage needs. Looks like they were just purchased by NETGEAR for $60 million in cash and a $20 million earn-out over three years. Nice. Infrant’s mission statement says that they’re “…dedicated to bringing enterprise-level storage technology to the masses at affordable prices”

The ReadyNAS line of products (especially the ReadyNAS NV+) offers network attached storage (up to 3TB) as well as RAID 0/1/5/X-RAID capabilities. It has four bays for SATA hard drives, and is a lot sleeker and smaller than it looks in their promotional material. They also have ability to add third-party software “plugins” such as the Slim Devices Slim Server to allow the ReadyNAS to seamlessly integrate your music collection into your music distribution system. Personally, I think the ReadyNAS guys should really focus on this plugin capability and continue to build out support for other applications out there.

Going forward, I believe there are going to be more offerings (such as the ReadyNAS) that narrow the price/feature gap between the enterprise and the masses. If Google doesn’t buy you out, I think your hardware vendors such as Netgear, Linksys (Cisco), etc. are watching and waiting to pick the right upcoming companies at the right time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 7:01 am and is filed under Disruptive Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.