Why SMEs must think big when buying a NAS
It’s not just performance and capacity that ambitious and creative enterprises need to consider, but also what skills and capabilities the OS brings
There’s a prevailing wisdom that smaller enterprises are best served by entry-level storage. If your company has fewer than ten people, the thinking goes, then why spend more on a high-performance NAS? Surely even a medium-sized firm with 50 to 100 seats should be able to manage with an inexpensive four-bay appliance?
For many cutting-edge and creative firms, however, this doesn’t hold true. Take SMEs in creative industries: design studios, small publishers, 3D graphics and post-production houses. Or photographers, game developers and online media startups, to name but a few. These enterprises need high-performance appliances that can manage large, complex libraries of media files.
Similarly, SMEs in finance, technology, software development, architecture and marketing may have requirements that go beyond backup and storage. They may want the ability to run specialist workloads in virtual machines or the capacity to handle massive, complex datasets. They may need to test applications in a safe, secure space before being deployed to the cloud.
What’s more, even small firms have big ambitions. They’re looking for solutions that can scale as they grow.
The QNAP TVS H874 series meets these requirements head on. For a start, it’s one of the most powerful desktop NAS devices in the market, based around 12th-generation Intel Core i5, i7 and i9 processors with up to 16 cores and 24 threads. Not to mention up to 64GB of RAM.
These are devices that deliver lightningfast data storage and a whole lot more.
They can host multiple virtual machines or containers, dynamically allocating resources to maximise performance. With Intel AES-NI 256 hardware encryption, they can secure sensitive business-critical or customer data without any significant impact on speed.
Meanwhile, 2.5GbE connectivity and port trunking mean you can make full use of today’s higher-speed Ethernet networks to handle multiple workloads simultaneously. If your desktop PCs or laptops don’t yet support 2.5GbE, QNAP’s USB adapter is on hand. When it’s time to copy large, complex project files or collaborate on 4K video footage, this high-speed architecture won’t leave users waiting.
Need the very best speeds? Dual M.2 PCI-E slots enable SSD caching for additional performance, plus the H874 series’ PCI-E 4.0 slots enable you to upgrade to 5GbE or 10GbE.