Rackspace Managed Hosting, a leading provider of managed Internet hosting services, today announced a partnership with LAND-5, the leader in mission-critical storage applications, to offer Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for its customers' servers. The Rackspace NAS is tailored for small- to medium-sized businesses wanting to take advantage of a centralized storage system.

Enterprise storage systems have been traditionally available only to large businesses that could afford expensive storage networks and had staff able to handle the complex configuration of these arrays. Rackspace's NAS offering costs approximately $1,500 per month, compared to traditional NAS offerings of $15,000 per month.

The new storage system allows customers to add NAS to their server operations quickly and easily. Month-to-month contract agreements provide customers with a flexible solution. "Once again, Rackspace has brought innovation to the hosting marketplace," said Farouk Al-Nasser, president and chief operating officer for LAND-5. "Rackspace's NAS offering utilizes our software to run on their hardware, which creates unprecedented storage capacity, reliability and ease of use."

The Rackspace NAS allows customers to quickly scale up to 1.4 terabytes of networked storage (1,400 GB). The Web-based interface and setup wizard makes it easy for businesses to configure the NAS from the convenience of their desktops. This storage will be available to all of the servers in the cluster and is fully supported on all Rackspace standard platforms, including Microsoft Windows, RedHat Linux, Sun Solaris and FreeBSD.

The Rackspace NAS provides greater speed and reliability than traditional server-based storage alternatives. To maximize uptime, the NAS is available with redundant, hot-swappable SCSI RAID-5 drives. Built-in diagnostics can notify the administrator by email if an internal error is detected. "Downtime can be catastrophic in today's online world," said Graham Weston, chief executive officer of Rackspace Managed Hosting. "Offering cost- effective storage expansion with high reliability and easy file management is central to our business. LAND-5's software allows us to optimally configure capacities and performance to meet our customers' needs."