QNAP TS-639 Pro

QNAP TS-639 Pro Turbo NAS

QNAP's iSCSI-enabled NAS solution is a perfect match for the growing small office, especially one expanding beyond the internal storage of a VMware or Windows Hyper-V virtualization server. Of course, no sub-$1,000 box is going to be as fast as an enterprise SAN, but the QNAP is a snap to set up (even the iSCSI), and it's packed with software bells and whistles. With a long list of features, QNAP add-ons, and QPKG community extensions available, the QNAP Turbo NAS is truly a jack-of-all-trades. I've been running three models in my lab, where I tested their performance across a range of file services tasks using the Intel NAS Performance Toolkit. All three models are built on a low-power x86 CPU and a common Linux operating system. The four-bay TS-419U is a 1U rack-mount system with a Marvell 1.2GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM, while the four-bay TS-459 Pro and six-bay TS-639 Pro are desktop cabinet systems with an Atom 1.66GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. As the specs suggest, the TS-419U ran a step or two behind its two cousins. Any self-respecting NAS appliance today fulfills basic functions such as Dynamic DNS, flexible disk configs (JBOD, RAID 0,1,5), streaming media support, WebDAV for drive mounting over HTTP/SSL, workstation backup, and FTP, and the QNAP does not disappoint.