NETGEAR has just announced the ReadyNAS 716, a powerful Network Attached Storage (NAS) system for business usage that NETGEAR says is powerful enough to serve 150 concurrent 1080p video streams… if your network can support it. To achieve this level of performance, NETGEAR has tapped into a powerful Xeon (Ivy Bridge) E3-1225v2 quad-core CPU from Intel which runs at 3.2GHz and is couple with 16GB of RAM (ECC memory). More importantly, NETGEAR has chosen to connect via a 10Gb Ethernet protocol, and even features two Ethernet ports on this NAS, in case one of them fails for some reason (and no, you cannot aggregate the bandwidth of both ports).
Hardware is nice, but software is just as important: ReadyNAS 716 runs on the same ReadyNAS OS 6.x as the rest of the ReadyNAS line of product. For consumers like you and me, this means that nearly all the features available in the professional NAS system from NETGEAR are also available to regular folks with storage devices that are more nimble from a computing point of view, but just as sophisticated when it comes to security, features and relative ease of use.
Before you get too excited and start searching for the ReadyNAS 716 online, you should know that it is a $3000 (give or take) device that is designed for an Enterprise use, so this will be overkill for most people. That said, a small/medium design agency could probably use something like this for their storage needs.