Application vs. Performance
With entry-level storage systems, application is everything and performance is only part of the picture. To evaluate our NAS systems, we used five criteria: features, performance, price, scalability and management. The real challenge lies in finding the best combination of factors for your organization.
With this in mind we chose to use equal weighting for all our criteria and, when we tallied all the scores, Adaptec's Snap Server 520 earned our Editor's Choice award. The 520 is the middle system in Adaptec's new 500 series of 1-U NAS systems, which includes the slightly smaller 510 and the larger capacity, higher performance 550. Middle of the line or not, the Snap Server 520 performed impressively, and won three of four read/write tests with load-balanced, dual NIC numbers rivaling those of 2Gbps Fibre Channel. This performance, combined with the flexibility, security and excellent suite of features of the Snap Guardian OS, made the Snap Server 520 a natural choice.
We had a dead heat for second place, between HP's ProLiant ML310 G3 and Aberdeen's AberNAS 128. Priced almost identically when you factor in the extra terabyte of included disk storage, the AberNAS 128's excellent performance statistics ran neck-and-neck with the ML310 G3's flexibility and impressive remote management capabilities. Both systems offer the familiarity of the WSS user interface, and have all the right stuff for many small business and departmental applications.
We were only a little surprised to find that the least expensive and most expensive systems came in equally rated. The ReadyNAS NV's combination of low price and useful features was offset by its low performance ratings, while the FlexNAS 6800E XT's high cost and midline performance overshadowed the unit's nice features and scalability. Although performance can be an issue in larger environments, each would be suitable for less storage-intensive business applications.
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