The last year has seen prices tumble for network attached storage. We look at four of the best options to get some more storage on your network.
There's not much point in buying a product that is going to be adequate for your current needs since most likely your needs will expand before you know it; this is especially the case for storage. Employees need to store locally and share more data all the time and one way you can supply the demand is adding additional hard disks to your server. However this can be a tiresome task. It can mean powering down the server, running new data cables, installing I/O cards, and drivers.
An easier way to increase your data storage capacity is by using a Network Attached Storage device (NAS). NAS are specialised file servers for Ethernet networks. They are generally not used to run applications but can be used for backup. By simply attaching a NAS device to your network you can instantly increase your storage capacity by 1TB or more.
In this review we looked at four NAS units. Three of the devices used IDE disks internally, while one used Fibre Channel (FC) hard disk drives. All the devices tested had total storage capacities of 1TB and ran over a gigabit Ethernet connection.
The first thing we noticed about these new NAS devices was the price. They have come down dramatically compared to this time last year. Not only are they a lot cheaper, they're also faster and can store more data. To give you an idea, last year Snap Appliance submitted a 4400 Guardian, which cost a little over AU$13,000 and could store 475GB. For this review, Snap Appliance submitted a Snap Appliance Server 4500 that costs less than $6000 and can store 1TB of data. Or if we put it in terms of cost per GB the difference is $83 per GB compared to $6 per GB.
The best part is the NAS device doesn't need to be located within a server but can exist anywhere in a LAN. It's also generally accessible to clients and servers running different OS.
Primary operating systems
NAS devices typically run on a Windows or Linux operating system and few run their own proprietary operating system. NAS devices like the Network Appliance device boots from a CompactFlash Card while most other NAS devices boot from the actual hard disks. The primary OS resides on drive 0 and is mirrored on drive 1 while the secondary OS resides on drive 2 and is mirrored on drive 3. If the primary OS becomes corrupt, the device will attempt to boot from the secondary OS and if that is corrupt you have to resort to a restore DVD that will restore the system back to the factory defaults.
Web administration
Most NAS devices can now be configured from a Web browser. After configuring the NAS with an IP address from the console or provided software, you can launch a Web browser and set up the drive configuration, such as RAID levels. From here you can configure the following settings and more:
- System settings: fate/time, e-mail notification, SNMP alerts, UPS, SSH
- Network settings: network information, TCP/IP, DHCP, Windows networking, Apple networking, NFS networking, Web, FTP
- Storage: RAID, devices, volumes, share, quotas, snapshots, directories
- Security: share access, users, groups, Unix NIS, Windows
- Maintenance: OS update, factory defaults, disaster recovery, antivirus, shutdown/reboot
- Monitoring: status, SCSI info, volume usage, event log
