NetGear (http://www.netgear.com) says it will soon start shipping new
versions of its unmanaged series of network switches to provide small
to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with new options to reduce their
network energy requirements.

Aimed directly at SMBs and delivered via NetGear’s reseller partners,
both rack-mounted and desktop “green” switches incorporate new
hardware that optimizes power efficiency and enables new power
management modes that can reduce power consumption by as much as 52
percent, leading to significant savings on network energy costs,
according to Sanjay Kumar, NetGear’s director of SMB Switching
Products. NetGear will provide a demo of these new switches and
display its full line of SMB devices — including the following ones
— at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany, March 3-8.

The company is also expanding its ProSafe FSM line of Managed, Fast
Ethernet switches for SMBs. The new ProSafe FSM Series of Layer 2
Fast Ethernet Switches are the first SMB switches to combine
high-performance, easy-to-use manageability and a small 1U form
factor with the ability to “stack” switches together for increased
capacity, thus enabling SMBs to increase the size of their network on
a “pay as you grow” basis, says Kumar.

The NetGear FSM Series of Managed, Fast Ethernet Switches is
available now worldwide from direct marketers, e-commerce sites, and
NetGear value-added resellers, at an estimated U.S. street price
starting at $299.99 for the FSM726E, at $399.99 for the FSM7226RS,
and at $679.99 for the FSM7250RS. All ProSafe products are backed by
a full lifetime warranty and optional ProSupport Maintenance Packages.

Finally, NetGear has announced ReadyNAS Vault, a new online backup
and disaster-recovery service for consumers and SMBs. It works with
all versions of the ReadyNAS products.

Consumers and SMBs can regularly copy data to a NetGear facility and
can recover data from any web browser and any Internet location.
Backup jobs, individual ReadyNAS systems and recovery tasks are all
centrally located in an online console. Administrators and resellers
alike can use ReadyNAS Vault’s online interface to confirm that
backups have taken place, to change to backup tasks and to recover
critical files.

A free 30-day trial of the service is available now on all ReadyNAS
systems. Pricing for the ReadyNAS Vault service starts at $5.95 per
month for consumers and $19.95 per month for businesses