When considering which NAS to choose, you need to assess your particular needs. Regarding NAS models available on the market, the following factors can be taken into consideration:
- NAS storage capacity. Number of drive bays in your NAS model – see below – and the size of each installed drive define this.
- Number of drive bays / supported hard disk drives.
- Price.
- Warranty period.
- External communication ports availability. Usually includes: up to 4 GbE ports, USB 3.0, eSATA.
- Supported RAID types. Usually, RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 6 / 10 should be available, which offers a choice between best performance, storage capacity and reliability.
- Amount of RAM. At least 512 MB needed for Transporter-only installation and at least 1 GB – for full-solution installation. For optimal performance, 2 GB needed for Transporter-only installation and 4 GB needed for full-solution installation.
- Number of CPU cores.
- Native deduplication and compression support.
- Available encryption technologies.
There are two general use cases:
- The NAKIVO Backup & Replication application runs outside of the NAS.
- The application runs inside the NAS. In this case, NAKIVO Backup & Replication must support the vendor, model, and operating system of the NAS. Refer to System Requirements for a list of supported NAS models.
To run NAKIVO Backup & Replication outside of your NAS, you must deploy a NAKIVO Backup Repository on your NAS model, while the rest of the application components will be deployed on other equipment, thereby decreasing the load on the hardware.
Running NAKIVO Backup & Replication inside of your NAS allows you to combine backup software, backup hardware, backup storage, and data deduplication in a single device. Moreover, backup data is written directly to NAS disks, bypassing network protocols such as NFS and CIFS, thereby fully using the available NAS bandwidth and achieving speeds of over 1 Gbit/s.
Other functionality that can be taken into consideration for choosing your NAS model:
- HDD hot-swapping support, which provides a high level of flexibility.
- Redundant power supply units availability.
- Compliance with 10GbE Ethernet standard or possibilities for 10GbE upgrade.
- Solid-state storage auto-tiering. With this option available, enhanced performance can be achieved, based on an automated process for moving data that needs to be accessed frequently to more expensive – but yet ultra-fast,– single-level cell storage; and moving data that is not frequently accessed to less expensive – but yet slow,– multi-level cell media.
- Thin provisioning method is tightly related to storage capacity. With this available, disk space is allocated in a flexible manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time. Thin provisioning may facilitate creating volumes larger than the available physical space. The feature is of use when deploying a block-level storage volume.
- Intelligent uninterruptible power supply support, which can significantly reduce the risk of disk corruption.
- Support of iSCSI for block-level storage over LAN.
- Support of online cloud service providers.
- Support and regular software updates.
- Support of transcoding protocols.