Comparing 5 to 50TB NAS storage boxes

In Store

Article from ADMIN 12/2012

By Jens-Christoph Brendel

RAID technologies are ubiquitous, but how do they fit in centralized storage devices for workgroups, branch offices, or small businesses? We compared six models.

NAS storage vendors have discovered that a small computer, a disk controller, and a handful of disks can do more than act as dumb storage; NAS storage devices provide the ingredients for a portfolio of solutions, from streaming servers to private clouds, databases to LDAP hosts, PBX systems to backup disks. However, individual NAS storage strategies do differ substantially: The field is led by companies such as Synology and QNAP, who offer dozens of pre-configured modules of various types. Both support easy installation through an integrated package manager. At the other end of the scale are vendors with fewer extensions who offer lower equipment specs and target a smaller range of applications.

When it comes to actual storage, NAS storage systems are not so wildly different (see Tables 1-3 for a comparison of important features). All of the NAS devices in our lab used Intel processors and supported popular RAID levels, at least 1 and 5; the better devices also offered a dual-parity variant like RAID 6. (See the box titled "RAID Basics" for more on RAID techniques.) Because NAS devices are typically embedded Linux systems, they usually support at least a couple of the major Linux filesystems and provide about 2GB of RAM, and all of them support two 1Gb Ethernet interfaces; some allow the configuration of jumbo frames (especially for iSCSI), and many support channel bonding. All of the devices use SATA disks (3 or 6Gbps) with up to 4TB capacity. Typically, you can deploy 2.5- or 3.5-inch formats; of the devices we tested, only Buffalo and Netgear did not bother providing drill holes for smaller disks in the cradles. In our lab, we used systems with 6 to 12 disk slots. All devices had USB interfaces to support extensions with external disks: Only QNAP, Thecus, and Iomega also had an eSATA interface for this purpose. All of the devices were usable as iSCSI targets (in addition to their NAS

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