Cisco NSS2000 review

Installation starts by running Cisco’s discovery utility and then it’s over to the simple web interface for some wizard assistance. We opted to mirror our pair of 1TB drives and were disappointed to see this take nearly six hours to build. The home page opens with a status display for the RAID array, volumes, used storage, shares and connected users.

The appliance’s standard share profile only supports simultaneous connections from 15 CIFS and two FTP users whilst a global advanced profile drops the CIFS count to eight and pushes FTP up to 16. The reason for these profiles is the NSS2000 can take CIFS and FTP feeds from IP camera motion detection triggers so you can select the profile that suits these applications.

The video recording features aren’t anything radical as most IP cameras will send recordings to a standard Windows share or FTP server. If you want more surveillance features than look to appliances such as those from Qnap or Synology as these can display feeds from multiple IP cameras in their web interfaces, they provide basic motion detection and can record video directly to their disks.

Access controls for Windows and Linux users can be set using the appliance’s local database or by integrating with an AD server. FTP services run from a dedicated share and options are provided for limiting bandwidth usage and restricting user access. Soft and hard quotas at the user and group levels can be applied to shares where the first threshold sends a warning and the second stops further access.

The NSS2000 doesn’t come as standard with any backup software but Cisco does offer its CDP (continuous data protection) option. Costing around £103 for a three-user licence we’d recommend getting it. After installation, it asks for the folders and email clients that you want to protect and then seeds the remote location selected on the appliance.