A place to store all your data is undeniably practical, but sometimes you don't want to gamble your precious data on a third-party cloud. Could you achieve similar functionality with a small NAS appliance?
Decentralization was the battle cry of the client-server revolution – away with the mainframe! Now the pendulum has swung back and ended up in the cloud. However, in these times of Amazon, Google, and NSA and of spectacular hacks with millions of stolen records, both private individuals and enterprises are fully aware that private data attracts unwanted attention. Some businesses prefer to keep their data at home. To combine the benefits of a central repository with the advantages of local control, you really need to run your own cloud. Is that possible? The ADMIN
magazine team decided to test a few NAS appliances and see how far we could get.
We requested four NAS appliances from four manufacturers (Table 1). All of these products are also suitable for small businesses or larger departments. These products cost less than $1,000, including disks, and all are easy to manage, even without IT personnel.
Table 1
Test Equipment Specifications
QNAP
Synology
Thecus
Netgear
...
Use one of the options below to read the full article
RAID technologies are ubiquitous, but how do they fit in centralized storage devices for workgroups, branch offices, or small businesses? We compared six models.
Central network storage with clients for any platform are convenient, although the popular designation "cloud" is debatable. Yet, what is the best implementation? We compare three storage cloud solutions.
We take a practical look at disaster recovery approaches suitable for smaller NAS systems and highlight the tools offered by vendors, along with a collection of Linux and open source tools.
What can tinkerers save on storage, and what do you gain if you opt to spend more and buy a turnkey solution? We compared a do-it-yourself solution with a preconfigured appliance from the same source.
The iSCSI protocol lets you access block storage across a network connection. We show you how to connect a Debian 12 system with a Synology storage device over iSCSI.