QNAP TS-809 Pro

INTRODUCTION

Data sharing has become one of the essential tasks in the digital age. In today’s household it's not difficult to find multiple computers. This myriad of digital photos, emails, documents, and multimedia files that all need to be shared among multiple computers need to be stored in a centralized location. There are a few solutions for sharing files. The most common way would be a server that centralizes the digital contents. However, servers are often costly and require a bit of computer networking knowledge. The other disadvantage of setting up a dedicated server would be the power consumption. Even with a fairly cheap and power efficient dual-core processor with a motherboard with integrated video would still consume somewhere in the upper 70W under idle and close to 100W under load.

A much better alternative would be using a NAS, a network storage server. NAS often has a much smaller foot-print than a server. It often runs on a stripped down Linux OS that does not require much computer knowledge to set up. It is much cheaper than a full server and due to its design it is often much more energy efficient than a server. Most NASes often consume power less than 50W even under full load. Contrast this to a simple system with 70W of power consumption, the 20 extra watts of power consumption adds up when you leave the system running 24/7.

QNAP is a company that specialized in data storage. They have a wide range of NAS servers targeted at different environments. QNAP carries NAS ranging in 1-bay, 2-bay, 4-bay, 6-bay, or 8-bay sizes for different market segments. Depending on your need, you can choose their wide range of NAS where it will fit your budget and demand.

Their latest 8 bay unit, TS-809 Pro, is designed for SMB/Corporate environments. In order to offer good performance, QNAP opts to use a desktop processor from Intel instead of the SoC (Silicon on Chip) that is often found in many cheaper NASes. In fact, the TS-809 Pro uses the more energy efficient Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz CPU and 2GB DDR2 memory. Although we cannot confirm the exact model of the processor, based on the clockspeed, it is safe to assume it is the Intel E7400 as it is the only Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz. By using a 65W dual-core processor, the NAS would be more energy efficient while offering greater performance.

One thing that stands out for QNAP's current lineup of NASes is its support for iSCSI. iSCSI, Internet Small Computer System Interface, is an Internet Protocol (IP) based storage network standard where data is transmitted over existing network infrastructure. iSCSI is able to use the existing network protocol to transmit data at high performance block-level I/O by encapsulating data files into packets instead of fragments of data packets. As a result, data transfer rates are nearly the same as with direct SCSI connection. Because data is transferred in blocks-level, iSCSI can be used to transmit data over "local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and enable location-independent data storage and retrieval." (Wikipedia). This allows data to be transferred over long distances.

iSCSI was often found in storage area network (SAN), which is a more expensive storage solution than NAS. SAN requires specialized knowledge and training to configure and requires SCSI Fibre Channel. By incorporating iSCSI into NAS, QNAP eliminates the need for special cables while allowing users to reap the benefit of Fibre Channel storage solutions without incurring additional cost or technical knowledge.