This assessment first appeared in challenge 356 of PC Pro.
Representing the entry level of Qsan’s new NAS appliance household, the XCubeNAS XN5104R presents SMBs a small footprint storage answer with loads of room to develop. This competitively priced 1U rack NAS presents 4 hot-swap LFF/SFF SATA drive bays on the entrance, secretes a pair of NVMe SSD slots inside and groups them up with 4 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports.
A quad-core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon D-1714 CPU sits within the driving seat and is partnered by 8GB of DDR4 which may be expanded massively to 256GB. There’s room for extra community ports, because the spare PCI-E Gen4 slot accepts Qsan’s dual-port 10GbE and 25GbE playing cards.
A compelling characteristic of Qsan’s NAS home equipment is their monumental growth potential, and the XN5104R isn’t any exception. Match Qsan’s SAS3 PCI-E card and you’ll daisy-chain a mixture of exterior disk cabinets for a complete of 414 drives and a most uncooked capability of 9PB.
For deployment, we loaded 4 22TB Western Digital Purple Professional NAS drives and used the XFinder app to find the equipment and set up the newest QSM software program. From the customized setup possibility, we created an enormous RAID5 storage pool and, when you set up NVMe SSDs, you’ll be able to assign one or each to a pool as a hybrid cache, which accelerates each learn and write operations.
QSM presents loads of storage administration and knowledge integrity options. The ZFS-based OS contains copy-on-write snapshots for NAS shares and iSCSI LUNs, in-line knowledge deduplication, clever real-time knowledge tiering and amenities for making use of one in every of three WORM (write as soon as learn many) insurance policies to NAS share knowledge. You should utilize a coverage to ensure nothing already in a share may be modified, set it in order that solely new information copied to the share have the retention date utilized, or cease something from ever being modified or deleted by making use of a WORM perpetually coverage.
The QSM internet console is simple to navigate however apps are briefly provide, with Qsan solely together with ones for file and media administration, {hardware} monitoring, antivirus, backup and cloud syncing. It used to supply VPN, SQL database, internet companies and hypervisor supervisor apps, however these have been dropped from QSM some time in the past.
The apps Qsan does present are simple to make use of, nonetheless. The Backup app manages snapshot scheduling and might safe equipment knowledge to any Rsync-compliant distant equipment, in addition to Amazon S3, Alibaba OSS and HiCloud S3 cloud accounts. It will probably replicate folders between XCubeNAS home equipment utilizing the Xmirror service, whereas the Cloud Sync app handles one-way and two-way sync jobs with Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive.
Qsan followers will just like the free XInsight app, which presents central administration for all their AFA, NAS and SAN home equipment. Run as an internet service on any Windows host, its internet console supplies an summary of all exercise, storage utilization and alert notifications plus fast entry to every equipment’s administration console.
Efficiency over 2.5GbE is sweet.
A share mapped to a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Home windows Server 2022 host returned 2.3Gbits/sec and a couple of.2Gbits/sec for each Iometer sequential and random learn and write checks, and the XN5104R delivered equivalent leads to our 2.5GbE IP SAN checks. For the latter, we elevated the strain with a twin 2.5GbE MPIO hyperlink to our 1TB iSCSI goal and recorded sequential reads and writes of 4.6Gbits/sec and 4.2Gbits/sec, whereas random operations held agency at 4.6Gbits/sec and 4Gbits/sec.
SMBs searching for a good-value rack NAS equipment with an unlimited potential for capability growth will discover so much to love about Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN5104R.
It’s gentle on apps however massive on 2.5GbE efficiency, and Qsan’s QSM software program delivers nice knowledge integrity and storage administration options.