By CHARLES BRODSKY

Intel's new storage station, which is a part of its In-Business product line, may be intended for small-business networks, but it has features that make it suitable for use as a departmental server in enterprise networks.

The Intel InBusiness Storage Station is designed to provide a central location for users to store or backup their files. It lives up to its promise.

The Storage Station is roughly the size of a typical notebook computer. It comes with either a 12-GB or 24-GB hard drive, a Pentium 266-MHz processor, a built-in 10/100 Ethernet NIC and backup software. The included software supports workstations running Windows 9.x or NT 4.0. The Storage Station also can serve as a DHCP server or client, and can use Windows Internet Naming Service.

It's easy to add this product to a small network, even if you don't know much about network setup. We had very little trouble getting the Storage Station up and running. The documentation is clearly written and oriented toward network novices.

You administer the Storage Station through a Web browser. If you don't have a suitable Web browser installed, the CD-ROM will automatically install Internet Explorer v4.01 for you.

The management interface has a navigation pane along the left side with categories such as Status, Manage Users and Share Folder, which makes for intuitive administration.

One feature we would liked to have seen is the option to log off. Only one computer at a time can administer the unit, so if you go to another machine, you'll have to wait for your last connection to time out before you can establish a new session--even if you close the browser. The time-out is only about two minutes, but it can feel like forever if something isn't working and you have to wait for the problem to subside.

This probably won't be too much of an issue for most small networks, since they're likely to administer the Storage Station from a single system.

Something else to be aware of is how users connect to the Storage Station. When you first set up the PC to use the Storage Station, it will create a mapping to the public folder for you. Next time a Win 9.x client logs in, the mapping will be gone. Because of this, you will need to show users how to find the Storage Station.

While this problem is easy to solve by using batch files or scripts, it may require more networking knowledge than a small- business network manager possesses. We would have liked to have seen an option to let you automatically create a shortcut on the desktop for this share.

But a feature that we did particularly like was the Storage Station's ability to use Windows NT domain groups and accounts to assign permissions. As you would expect, you can also create users and groups on the Storage Station. We didn't have any problems accessing shares using either the local or Windows NT accounts.

The backup software Intel includes with the Storage Station is a five-user version of Centered Systems' Second Copy 97. This backup program is also easy to use and doesn't require that you back up your files just onto the Storage Station.

We liked having the ability to back up files based on their extensions--for example, choosing just to back up doc or xls files. This software is simple to work with and, once it is set up, users will not have to spend much time thinking about backing up their files.

Overall, we were impressed with the Intel InBusiness Storage Station. Getting it on the network was quick and painless. Having simple back-up software that doesn't require attention after it's configured is a welcome feature. Windows NT domain authentication, WINS and DHCP support also make enterprise integration simpler. Administration and setup is easy and requires significantly less knowledge than maintaining a full Windows NT or NetWare server.

Still, we really hope Intel will include the ability to log off the administrator console in a future version of the software.

However, despite this quibble, if you are looking for an easy way to add more storage capacity to your network, you should take a close look at Intel's InBusiness Storage Station.

Charles Brodsky is a freelance writer, network administrator and trainer based in New York. He can be reached at cbrodsky7@msn.com.