Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

The NAS device market has showed some good news for the SOHO and small business users over the last few months. While affordable and feature-rich NAS devices have been around for a pretty long time, it’s not until recently that the major players have added (or are planning to add in the next weeks) iSCSI support to their devices. I consider iSCSI support extremely useful as it allows you to build entreprise-like storage for a fraction of the cost that you’d need to spend with going the fibrechannel route. Having done some research, here’s what I’ve found on the Internet.

www.qnap.com

QNAP has a nice list of NAS devices, most of the newer ones supporting iSCSI along with the usual set of integrated features like webserver, audio server, iTunes serving, etc. We use a SS-439 Pro Turbo at atHome Group for our internal development needs, fitted with four 1TB disks, and it has so far proven excellent value and performance. All of our staging and pre-production virtual machines run off of this one. It is interesting to note that they also have 2.5 inch disk models for “increased reliability and better power economy” as they say.

www.thecus.com

THECUS also has announced a new line of products featuring iSCSI. The N5500 also features Dual-DOM for added protection against system failures.

www.synology.com

SYNOLOGY have announced iSCSI support to be available during july/august 2009, for most NAS’s of their product line, as a simple software update to DSM 3.0.

www.drobo.com

DATA ROBOTICS have launched their new DROBO PRO that can handle up to 8 disks and features iSCSI support along with the BeyondRaid technology that allows you to mix any number, size, speed and manufacturer of disks to progressively match your storage needs. The price seems a bit hefty though (around 1000 euro without disks), but I guess it’s still very good for an 8 disk unit.

All of these NAS’s cost around 600 to 700 euro excl. VAT and without disks for the 4/5-disk models, which allows you to build an almost-enterprise-class storage wit iSCSI support and 3TB useable storage for around 1000 euro – wow!

Some help for my friends : HitechPC in Belgium (www.hitechpc.be) can order most of these on request, at very good prices.

UPDATE 13th of July 2009 : I’ve just noticed that QNAP has released another entry-level two-disk NAS device with iSCSI support, the QNAP TS-219P, costing roughly 330 euro excl. taxes.

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