Best Rackmount NAS Server to Buy

Top 3 Rackmount NAS of the Year

Making the jump from small to big business can be a fantastically intimidating one and with increasing laws about data protection and GDPR (urgh!) to take into account, choosing the right hardware for your data storage can be both a fantastically dull and complicated one. One a business moves into the 10-25 staff level bracket, they enter a whole new area of data storage and whereas in the past an old modded PC or desktop system was sufficient to maintain yoru data integrity, at this point you need to look at something a great deal more robust, rugged and reliable. This is the entry point for rackmount NAS servers and unlike their desktop/tower versions, these are going to cost you more, require alot more research and involve considerably more variables in the workflow that home and small business users just don’t consider. This difficulty is further increased with the wide array of brands, models and architectures that are available in Rackmount NAS form – each with its own hardware or software speciality. Luckily I have gone through practically ALL of them in the pursuit of choosing the best rackmount NAS drive of 2019 and below I have listed the very top 3 that you can choose from. Although all three are the very BEST that each brand has produced in 2019, they all have their own priority of Software, Hardware or Security as their own primary selling point.

Synology RS1619XS+ Rackmount NAS Drive – £££

0-64TB, 4-Bays, expandable to 16 Bay MAX, Xeon D1527 4-Core CPU, ECC DDR4 Memory, 4x 1Gbe LAN, PCIe Slot, NVMe SSD Bays, 2x PSU, £1600+ ex.VAT  

Synology RS1619xs+ Hardware Review – https://nascompares.com/synology-rs1619xs-rackstation-nas-review/

 

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QSAN XN8008R Rackmount NAS Server – £££

0-128 TB, 8 HDD Bays, 4 SSD 2.5″ Bays, 2x NVMe SSD Bays, Intel Xeon Quad-Core 3.3GHz, DDR4 ECC Memory, Thunderbolt 3, HDMI  £2,800+ ex.VAT  

QSAN XN8008R NAS Review – https://www.storagereview.com/qsan_xcubenas_xn8012r_review

QSAN’s new XCubeNAS XN8000R series are 2U NAS devices that are geared around performance. The NAS can scale up to 2PB of capacity with expansion units and up to 178TB raw in a 2U unit. For those looking to take advantage of SSD caching and tiering, the XCubeNAS XN8012R has six rear loading bays for SATA and NVMe SSDs. The NAS supports dual Intel Kaby Lake CPUs and up to 64GB of RAM. With performance, the QSAN XCubeNAS XN8008R was tested with both CIFS and iSCSI storage in RAID6 with the NVMe Tier0 engaged.

The NAS was able to put up some decent numbers. Highlights include 58K IOPS read in CIFS, 8,096 IOPS write in iSCSI in 4K with average latencies of 4.43ms read (CIFS) and 31.6ms write (iSCSI). In 8K the NAS hit 172K IOPS read (CIFS) and 107K IOPS write (iSCSI). And in our large block sequential 128K the NAS had bandwidth speeds of 1.6GB/s read (CIFS) and 2GB/s write (also CIFS).

The QSAN XCubeNAS XN8012R would make an excellent NAS for SMBs that need plenty of performance but may need to scale up in the future. The rear flash expansion bays make it a nice choice for tiering and caching without giving up capacity bays from the front, and the interface is easy to operate. While the NAS makes for a strong file host and lighter applications platform, database and other latency-sensitive use cases may want to step up to a more robust system. The ZFS filesystem, while offering many data integrity and data-reduction benefits, isn’t as performance-friendly for these types of workloads. In total though, the XN8012R is a nice complete offering from QSAN that should do well in SMB, ROBO and edge type use cases.

 

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QNAP TS-2483XU Powerhouse Rackmount NAS Drive – £££

0-384TB, 24-Bays, Xeon E-2136 Six Core, 3.3GHz boost to 4.5GHz, 16-64GB Memory, 2x PSU, 5x PCIe Slots, 2x 10Gbe, USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB A/C,   £5,300+ ex.VAT  

The TS-2483XU includes models with 8, 12, 16, and 24 drive-bays – and also a 9-bay hybrid storage model that supports four 3.5-inch HDDs and five 2.5-inch SSDs. It features server-grade hardware with Intel Xeon E processors, up to 64 GB dual-channel ECC DDR4 memory that assists in maintaining data integrity. The PCIe slots introduce flexible I/O expansion by installing 10GbE/ 25GbE/ 40GbE network cards for bandwidth-demanding applications, QM2 cards for adding additional M.2 SSDs, graphics cards for empowering GPGPU tasks, and SAS expansion cards for JBOD expansion.

The TS-2483XU provides two 10GbE SFP+ ports and supports QNAP’s newly released 25GbE NIC (QXG-25G2SF-CX4) to accelerate file sharing and intensive data transfer, realize high-speed remote backup via Hybrid Backup Sync, and support iSER (iSCSI Extension for RDMA) to improve VMware virtualization performance by using the Mellanox ConnectX -4 Lx SmartNIC controllers. Users can also enable SSD caching to tackle IOPS-demanding applications and allocate SSD extra over-provisioning (from 1% to 60%) to potentially attain higher SSD endurance levels and improved random write performance, ideal for enterprise applications, data centers, and storage virtualization.

The TS-x83XU performs as a scalable, integrated storage solution. It supports VMware , Citrix , Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2016. The ability to host multiple virtual machines and containers fulfills greater application potential. Block-based snapshots enable instant data backup and recovery with minimized RTO. The Network & Virtual Switch app features flexible manageability for reorganizing physical and virtual network connections with greater ease. QVR Pro can help create a professional-grade video surveillance system (includes 8 free IP camera channels, can be expanded to 128 channels by purchasing additional licenses). Overall, this is easily the most powerful, fully-featured rackmount NAS I have seen all year. It’s expensive, but you do genuinely get what you pay for!

 

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  This description contains links to Amazon. These links will take you to some of the products mentioned in today’s video. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases