Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS 450r

Iomega has been a long term player in the SMB storage business and over time has built up an impressive portfolio of products. The latest to join this extended family is the StorCenter Pro NAS 450r which now represents the very pinnacle of Iomegaâ€s rack mount NAS appliances and aims to offer small businesses affordable data protection facilities.

It terms of storage capacity the 450r isn't offering a spectacular deal as the model on review only has a raw 1TB which most desktop NAS boxes costing less than a grand can beat easily. However, the general hardware specification is well above average as the appliance sports a decent processor and a good helping of fast 667MHz DDR2 memory. There are spare DIMM slots on the motherboard but don't think about upgrading as opening the lid will invalidate the warranty. Backup to external devices such as tape drives is supported as the appliance has an embedded Ultra320 SCSI controller and offers a port at the rear.

The quartet of 250GB Hitachi DeskStar drives are fitted in sturdy hot-swap carriers and looked after by a PCI-e RAID controller preconfigured as a triple drive RAID-5 array with hot-standby. As the 450r is aimed at office environments noise levels need to be low and we can report that once the fans had settled down after power up the appliance was quite unobtrusive and not much louder than a well specified PC standing next to it.

Iomega really scores over the majority as its business appliances all run Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 (WSS2003) which delivers a far superior feature set than most of the Linux club. Two roads are available for installation and management as you can stick a mouse, monitor and keyboard on the 450r and access it locally but it is designed to be headless and ideally should be managed remotely over RDP. Installation is a simple enough affair as on first contact you get a quick setup wizard which leads you through adding basic network settings, configuring email alerts and securing administrative access.

User and groups are created in the normal Windows Server 2003 fashion as are volume shadow copies. The majority of storage configuration tasks can be carried out from the Storage Server Management (SSM) snap-in which organises the various features under a single tree in the left pane. The centre section provides access to more wizards and help files whilst the right pane is used to display actions and customise the whole interface. Shares can be created speedily as a wizard runs through choosing a folder, providing a share name and determining access restrictions. Setting up file and volume quotas is just as easy using predefined templates which allow you to decide whether they should be hard or soft. The former will block users from accessing more space if they have exceeded their quota whilst the latter merely reports the breach. Utilisation thresholds can also be added to quotas allowing the appliance to warn users if they are getting close to their limits. Iomega includes the file screening option which allows you to decide which files are allowed on the appliance. You also get the storage report tools included which provide details on areas such as duplicate files, quota usage and file ownership.

Even iSCSI is on the features list as Iomega includes a copy of Nimbus†MySAN on the appliance which can be installed straight from the management interface. You're not gaining any extra value here as this is the free version although you do have to license it by registering your details at Nimbus' web site. Note that the appliance's preconfigured partitions don't take MySAN in account and to use it we had to delete the data volume, create a smaller one, reinstate our shares and then use the remaining space for some iSCSI action.