Small companies installing their first network nearly always buy a general purpose file server, only to find it takes a lot of time and expertise to install and manage. A far simpler, and often cheaper, alternative is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance, such as the NAS 2108 Wireless from Evesham Technology. This is a device that comes ready-configured for network attachment and which can be managed remotely using a simple browser-based interface.

Despite its small size (the box is little bigger than an Ethernet switch) the NAS 2108 Wireless can be used to provide just about everything needed to support a small business LAN. To begin with it comes with up to 240GB of storage space, added to which there's an integrated print server, eight 10/100Mbps switched Ethernet ports, an 11Mbps wireless interface and a separate WAN port for an Internet router.

There's no need to open up the NAS 2108 - all you have to do is plug it in to the LAN and turn it on. But if you do open it you'll find a National Semiconductor Geode x86 processor, 128Mb of memory and two 120GB Maxtor ATA/133 hard disks. Not a match for a Pentium III based server and SCSI storage perhaps, but on a small LAN of 10-20 users you're unlikely to notice the difference.

The software is all stored and run from flash memory, making for a very robust solution which also frees up all the available disk space for data. And another bonus is the ability to configure the disks as a single volume, with or without data striping (RAID 0), or as a mirrored pair (RAID 1) for extra redundancy.

Mirroring is the default setting, but changing this is easy thanks to the simple and straightforward management interface, accessed using a Web browser. This hides the complexities of the Linux-based operating system and, as well as disk setup, makes it easy for the novice to perform common tasks such as adding users and managing access rights to shared folders and files.

A quick configuration wizard takes you through the basics with more detailed management options for those that need them. Using these we found the NAS 2108 Wireless very quick and easy to deploy, with Windows networking as standard plus optional Apple, Unix/Linux and Novell file sharing, as well as support for HTTP and FTP protocols.

There's no email or Web server and you can't run other applications on the NAS 2108. But as a file server appliance it's a comprehensive and very workable solution. Plus you don't need to buy any client licences, as you would with Windows 2000, when all you want is to share a few files and printers.

Surprisingly quick given its relatively low specification, the Evesham technology NAS 2108 Wireless benefits from lots of integrated LAN and WAN interfaces, is very robust and makes a good alternative to a general purpose file server on a small business network.