QNAP Turbo NAS TS-1279U-RP review

Scalable NAS appliance for SMBs

The TS-1279U-RP is QNAP's first foray into the high-end small business storage market and appears to be a well-conceived and reasonably scalable appliance.

QNAP has designed the appliance to address the needs of the larger SMB as it can offer up to 36TB of storage in a compact 2U format and is configurable for both NAS and iSCSI SAN sharing.

The rack-mount chassis has an all-metal construction with dual redundant power supplies (hence RP at the end of the name) and there are twin Gigabit Ethernet ports for LAN attachment complete with support for a selection of load balancing and redundancy options.

Dual-core power
An Intel Core i3 dual-core 3.3GHz processor provides the necessary computational power, supported by 2GB of DDR3 memory. This is upgradeable to 4GB by plugging in a second DIMM. There are also two PCI express expansion slots to accommodate the latest 10 Gigabit network adapters. These can be from either Emulex or Intel and need to be sourced separately.

Mix and match storage
The disks plug in at the front with 12 hot-swap bays arranged in three rows across the width of the unit. A screwdriver is needed to fit the disks into the caddies supplied, but it's not difficult and they slide in easily with a button on each to stop the caddies being ejected by accident. On the downside there are no locks, which could be an issue for some users.

For those after an easy life, the QNAP appliance can be bought readily populated with suitable disks. Our review unit came empty, so we had to organise our own memory. There is a choice of 3.5in or 2.5in SATA drives, including the latest SATA-300 (6Gbit/s) products or even solid state disks, for those who can afford them.

For the best results a matched set of fast, enterprise-quality disks are recommended. However, that's not mandatory and we made do with a mixture of makes and capacities. This wasn't ideal but caused no problems when it came to creating volumes or sharing them on our test network. Moreover, we found the process very easy using the built-in web interface, which allowed us to choose between RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10, formatted using either the EXT3 or EXT4 file system.

NAS volumes can be security encrypted and access managed via a variety of technologies including both a local user list and Active Directory authentication. A default set of network shares is also configured as part of the setup process and as well as Windows there's support for Apple and NFS file sharing and a built-in FTP server.

QNAP Turbo NAS TS-1279U-RP review

Scalable NAS appliance for SMBs

VMware and Hyper-V support
Creating iSCSI targets and connecting them to host servers proved a little more taxing, but there is a wizard to help. Plus you can host iSCSI and NAS shares together on the same appliance. There's explicit support for VMware and Hyper-V, which is good, plus a unique 'virtual disk' option that enables the appliance to connect to remote iSCSI targets and treat them as local resources and re-presenting those targets as network shares, for example.

Performance will depend on the disks used and the type of array configured. We carried out testing using a NAS share on a RAID 5 array using IOMeter on a Windows 7 PC. Read throughput averaged out at just under 150MB/s with this setup, and 118MB/s on writes. Not bad for an appliance that relies on software to provide RAID protection and is easily boosted by upgrading to faster disks and either using both network ports or upgrading to 10GbE.

Note also that there's a more scalable implementation of the appliance - the TS-EC1279U-RP - which features a faster quad-core Xeon processor plus 4GB of ECC-protected memory, which we found available online at around £3,150 + VAT, again, for the bare enclosure.

Although predominantly designed as a network storage appliance, the TS-1279U-RP can also be configured to run a variety of optional services and applications. Wisely, QNAP has dropped most of the consumer-focused apps found on its low-end products in favour of more business-oriented options, such as built-in web and MySQL servers, anti-virus protection and a web-based surveillance server to monitor and record video from network cameras. These are all presented as tick-box options which, like the storage, can be managed by users who might otherwise struggle to cope with such applications on a general-purpose server.

Backup Windows and Mac
There's good support for backup, starting with bundled client software for scheduled backup of Windows PCs along with Apple Time Machine support for Mac users. The appliance itself can, in turn, be backed up to an external storage device, with USB and eSATA ports for local disk connectivity plus support for backup to another QNAP appliance or Rsync device. iSCSI LUN snapshots are yet another built-in option along with backup to the cloud using Amazon S3 or ElephantDrive services. Added to which the TS-1279U-RP can be accessed and managed remotely using QNAP's free MyCloudNAS service.

We were impressed by the QNAP TS-1279U-RP, which proved both robust and easy to use, with all the storage options needed to service the needs of the larger SMB. There are quicker, more scalable, alternatives, but these will set you back a lot more than the QNAP product, which delivers a measured mix of features and performance at an affordable price.