An eight-bay rack-mount NAS unit
offering power redundancy and lots of features
Qnap’s latest NAS appliance has finally
brought lOGbE performance to a price point SMBs can afford. The TS-870U-RP is
an eight-bay rack-mount appliance that provides a couple of PCI Express
expansion slots, which support a wide range of optional lOGbE adapters.
The TS-870U-RP crams in a huge amount for
the money. There are dual 300W redundant power supplies, a 6Gbits/sec SATA III
disk controller, and 4GB of DDR3 memory (which can be upgraded to 16GB). The
price is kept down by removing the LCD and operator panel at the front and
using a basic 2.4GHz Intel Celeron G530 CPU.
Qnap
TS-870U-RP
For speed testing, we installed three 4TB
WD Enterprise SATA III drives and used Qnap’s slick web interface to create a
RAID5 array. We then linked the appliance to Dell Power Edge R515 and
Broadberry dual-Opteron 4100 rack servers, and used Emulex OCelll02-NM lOGbE
dual-port adapters on all three systems.
With a Windows share mapped to the Dell
server, Iometer reported raw read and write speeds of 950MB/sec and 825MB/sec.
We then ran Iometer on a second share mapped to the Broadberry server, and saw
cumulative read and write speeds soar to l,685MB/sec and l,052MB/sec
respectively.
These results translate to seriously fast
real-world speeds: drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip returned read
and write speeds of 3 10MB/sec and 282MB/sec, and FTP speeds, using FileZilla,
increased to 365MB/sec and 306MB/sec respectively. Performance bodes well for
general backup operations, too, as our 22.4GB collection of 10,500 small files
was copied to the appliance at a rate of 112MB/sec.
With
a Windows share mapped to the Dell server, Iometer reported raw read and write
speeds of 950MB/sec and 825MB/sec.
Qnap’s DSM firmware has now reached version
3.8, but most of the additions are multimedia toys rather than business-focused
additions. These comprise the new DJ Station, Video Station and TV Station,
plus updates to Photo Station and Music Station 3. Surveillance Station Pro has
also been updated and now boasts greater support for IP cameras and an
increased range of monitoring tools, including multiple viewing windows, motion
detection, scheduled recording and an e-mapping service. There’s also a new
VMobile app for conducting video-surveillance operations via iOS and Android
devices, but the appliance includes only one camera license as standard; extra
licenses cost around $56 each.
The TS-870U-RP’s IP SAN features are among
the best. Thin provisioning is included, along with iSCSI LUN backup to a
remote storage location over CIFS or NFS. Qnap offers a wide selection of
freely available add-in packages, too, with ClamAV providing options to run
antivirus scanning on selected folders.
The
TS-870U-RP’s IP SAN features are among the best
We encountered no issues with the Google
Drive sync package, and, for cloud backup, there’s support for ElephantDrive,
Amazon S3 and Symform-hosted services. Qnap’s MyCloudNAS service provides
secure remote access to selected services on the appliance, and NetBak
Replicator receives a major refresh, with version 4 adding snapshots, real-time
replication and support for MyCloudNAS.
The Qnap’s closest competitor is Thecus’
similarly priced N8900 (web ID: 372421), but while it’s a good performer, it
lacks redundant PSUs, and it’s beginning to show its age in other respects,
too.
If you want an eight-bay rack-mount NAS
appliance with power redundancy, an unbeatable range of features and tip-top
10GbE performance, the Qnap TS-870U-RP is a cracking choice.
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Key Specs
·
2U rack chassis
·
2.4GHz Intel Celeron G530
·
4GB DDR3 (max 16GB)
·
512MB DOM
·
8 x hot-swap 3.5in/2.5in SATA II/III drive
bays
·
supports RAID0, 1,5,6,5 + hot spare, JBOD
·
2 x Gigabit Ethernet
·
2 x USB 3 4xUPB2
·
2x eSATA
·
2 x PCI-E
·
2 x 308W PSUs
·
Qnap Finder, NetBak Replicator and QGet
software
·
3yr KTB warranty
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