This overview first appeared in challenge 356 of PC Pro.
Representing the entry level of Qsan’s new NAS appliance household, the XCubeNAS XN5104R affords SMBs a small footprint storage resolution 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 could 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 enlargement potential, and the XN5104R is not any exception. Match Qsan’s SAS3 PCI-E card and you may 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 Crimson Professional NAS drives and used the XFinder app to find the equipment and set up the most recent QSM software program. From the customized setup choice, we created a giant RAID5 storage pool and, should you set up NVMe SSDs, you possibly can assign one or each to a pool as a hybrid cache, which accelerates each learn and write operations.
QSM affords 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 services for making use of one among three WORM (write as soon as learn many) insurance policies to NAS share knowledge. You should use a coverage to ensure nothing already in a share could 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 without end coverage.
The QSM net console is straightforward 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, net providers 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, nevertheless. The Backup app manages snapshot scheduling and may safe equipment knowledge to any Rsync-compliant distant equipment, in addition to Amazon S3, Alibaba OSS and HiCloud S3 cloud accounts. It may possibly 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 affords central administration for all their AFA, NAS and SAN home equipment. Run as an online service on any Windows host, its net console gives an summary of all exercise, storage utilization and alert notifications plus fast entry to every equipment’s administration console.
Efficiency over 2.5GbE is nice.
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 assessments, and the XN5104R delivered similar leads to our 2.5GbE IP SAN assessments. For the latter, we elevated the stress 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 infinite potential for capability enlargement will discover rather a lot to love about Qsan’s XCubeNAS XN5104R.
It’s gentle on apps however huge on 2.5GbE efficiency, and Qsan’s QSM software program delivers nice knowledge integrity and storage administration options.

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