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/

What makes Synology impressive in the field of business over the last 2 years, is that they spend more time and money on their applications than any other NAS brand. The result is that 1, the DSM software gets much, much greater results from the hardware than 3rd party apps or other NAS brands with their own software, and 2, they are not just selling hardware but a complete storage solution that fills pretty much every modern need for your data in business. I know this sounds too good to be true, but they really have gone the extra mile on this software. The RS1619xs+ provides you with the hardware platform to make the most of their software platform. Add to this that the RS1619xs+ arrives with 5 years of warranty and 3 years of the Synology Replacement Service (SRS) for next day, no quibble, replacement in the event of hardware issues AND access to the Synology premium support services and you are looking at a solid and very grounded data storage solution indeed
What makes the RS1619xs such an appealing server in 2018 is that it manages to give you everything that Synology as a brand promises, in such a compact form. Because this is a hardware geared device, it is more expensive than most typical 4 Bay NAS – but as always you need to work out your priorities and decide where to leverage your spending. Synology has had a history of providing far too modest a hardware spec, in favour of software spending.
However, this new RS1619xs+ gives you a solid and reliable helping of both hard and software to push your business use to the top tier. More affordable units such as the RS818+ or RS819 give you the 4 bays of RAID storage, but internal hardware that would reach it’s limit long before you do! The Synology RS1619xs+ represents more than just a rackmount NAS with better than average hardware, it represents Synology listening to their critics and answering with a device that ticks all the boxes – Price, Power, Software, Capacity. One of the best things they have put out to market in years!

 


 

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.


 


 

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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