Chapter 4. Accessories

4.1 Serial Port expanders

GSL supply a range of serial port expanders which provide additional serial ports via a USB connection to the NAM. They are single-height (1U), nineteen-inch rack-mounting units with part numbers CMG-NSP-RM08, CMG-NSP-RM16 and CMG-NSP-RM24. The final two digits of the part number indicate the number of ports.

These systems have a single USB type B connector on the front panel and eight, sixteen or twenty-four nine-pin serial ports on the rear panel. Because the serial ports require more power than is available from a single USB connection, a 5 V DC power input is required.

To deploy these systems, connect a suitable 5 V DC power supply and then connect the unit to the NAM using a USB Type A to USB Type B cable. The NAM will automatically detect the new serial ports and provide automatically-generated names for them, depending on any previously-connected units.

4.2 Network accessible storage

GSL supply NAS (network-accessible storage) units, part number CMG-NAS-RMExxx (where xxx indicates the capacity) which provide additional storage capacity for the NAM and extra resiliance, through the use of RAID technology. They are single-height (1U), nineteen-inch rack mounting systems suitable for data-centre use and each unit holds four drives, providing up to 12 TB of storage (less if mirroring is enabled). The total power consumption is around 30 W.

The CMG-NAS-RMExxx works with 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA hard drives mounted in hot-swappable drive carriers and includes two Gigabit LAN ports for multi-IP settings and port trunking (7 bonding modes).

The CMG-NAS-RMExxx supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 5+hot spare, single and JBOD disk configurations. Online RAID capacity expansion and online RAID level migration allows expansion of storage capacity and upgrading of the RAID level without disrupting services. The RAID recovery feature secures the data against accidental removal of the hard drives.

To configure a NAM to use a CMG-NAS-RMExxx, open the web interface and navigate to

In the “Storage device” drop-down menu, select “Remote NFS mount”. Go to the NFS tab and enter the hostname or IP address of the NAS and the path of the directory that you with to use. Please see the “Recording and Retrieving Data” chapter of the Platinum manual for further details.