Business NAS appliances
Dave Mitchell compares four business-class storage appliances, and reveals the important features to look for when choosing hardware
Dave Mitchell compares four business-class storage appliances, after revealing the most important features you should keep an eye out for when choosing hardware.
C loud storage has undoubted benefits for small and medium-sized businesses – but it’s not always the best option. Storing large volumes of data in the cloud gets expensive over the long term, and uploading rarely accessed archives can be a big waste of time as well as money.
A network-attached storage appliance is a much more attractive solution, providing a massive capacity for a fraction of the cost. True, your year-one spend will be higher, but over time you’ll come out ahead, compared to the recurrent costs of a cloud storage service.
NAS appliances have other benefits too. Keeping your data in-house puts you in charge of security. You have full control over who can access what, and you never need to worry about internet or cloud service outages. It’s also faster and more efficient to store and access data over your local network, compared to having to upload and download everything over your internet line.
As we’ll discuss, the latest NAS appliances are impressively versatile too, with native apps to handle backup and other duties. This month, we test business-class desktop and rack models from four of the biggest names in the market – Qnap, Qsan, Synology and Western Digital (WD) - to help you make the right choice.
Store and deliver
Business NAS appliances come in all shapes and sizes, and it’s important to pick one that fits your requirements both now and well into the future.
If you’re primarily looking for a backup vault, you’ll want a model with a high capacity and expansion potential, so it can grow as your storage demands increase. It’s always possible to extend storage by replacing installed disks with larger ones, but this is a time-consuming process, and while the array is being resized you’re liable to suffer from reduced performance and diminished RAID protection. It’s better to choose an appliance with bays to spare, so you can seamlessly add new disks as needed – or one that allows you to expand your storage by connecting external expansion units.
On the subject of disks, you may be tempted by enterprise-class SAS hardware, but SATA disks are cheaper and provide perfectly good performance for almost all businesses. Just don’t be tempted to use desktop-class drives as these aren’t designed for the demands of a NAS role. Choose NAS-specific models instead, such as Seagate’s IronWolf or IronWolf Pro and WD’s Red Plus or Pro models. These are designed with features such as vibration compensation technology, to minimise problems that might otherwise arise when a whole bank of drives is packed densely together and expected to work around the clock. The Pro models come with five-year warranties too, which you won’t get with a desktop drive.
“You may be tempted by enterprise-class SAS hardware, but SATA disks are cheaper and provide good performance”
Thanks for the memory
Modern NAS appliances are built around fast multicore CPUs that are more than capable of handling backups and file-sharing activities. The standard provision of built-in RAM – typically 4GB – will be ample for these tasks, but check that it’s upgradeable if you want to use more advanced features.
For example, some appliances have a caching option that boosts performance by automatically copying frequently accessed data to an internal SSD. This eats up memory: one vendor specifies that a 2TB cache requires at least 8GB of RAM.
Many NAS platforms also offer a range of downloadable apps to broaden the capabilities of your appliance. These will naturally increase memory usage; the hungriest are virtualisation apps, so if you like the idea of making your NAS double up as a virtualisation host, factor the number of VMs you require into your memory calculations.
Home and away
While lockdown restrictions are easing, homeworking isn’t going away any time soon. This won’t be a problem for modern NAS appliances, which almost invariably come with built-in remote-access services.
The easiest solutions present a cloud portal, where you can register your appliance and assign it a “quick connect” ID. Remote workers can then use this ID to log in from a browser and access permitted data and apps.
For extra security, many vendors support two-factor authentication (2FA), meaning users can’t access the appliance until they have verified their identity using an external authenticator app, such as those from Google and Microsoft.
To further protect your data, NAS systems often come preinstalled with security advisor apps. These can warn you about weak passwords, unprotected shares, unsecured apps, open network ports and so forth, and provide advice on locking them down. Since operating an in-house NAS means taking responsibility for your own security, we strongly recommend you make use of these apps from time to time.
Off-site replication
We’ve been singing the praises of local NAS as an alternative to cloud storage, but the cloud can still have a valuable role when it comes to disaster recovery. Choosing an appliance that works with a range of cloud providers makes it easy to implement a “3-2-1” backup policy, with the NAS providing frontline backup and the cloud serving as the off-site component.
If you would prefer not to be tied to a cloud service at all, you can instead configure your appliance to replicate its contents automatically to a second NAS unit in an off-site location. The same feature also works in reverse to protect remote appliances, sending data from home or remote offices back to the main NAS box at HQ.
Replication shouldn’t be confused with file syncing – but that’s another useful data protection feature, and if you pick the right appliance you can get it for free. Users simply need to install a desktop agent or mobile app to synchronise selected folders to the appliance, and across multiple computers – with no storage limits (aside from any quotas set by you) and no need to pay a third-party provider such as Dropbox or OneDrive.
Whether you’re looking for straightforward, low-cost storage or something that has enough power to work as a lightweight server, there’s a NAS appliance out there to suit your needs. The four products here cover a wide range of requirements and budgets – so read on to see which is the right fit for your business.