Cisco NSS2000 review

By Dave Mitchell, 14 Dec 2009

Rating:

Price as reviewed:£272 ex. VAT

The NSS family signals Cisco’s moves into the SMB network storage market. In this review we find out whether the NSS2000 has what it takes to stand up to the established names.

After backing up our source folder, the CDP software monitored it and as soon as we dropped some more files into it they were replicated immediately. Any files opened and then saved were copied straight away and the simple web interface made light work of data restoration.

Two features that make the NSS2000 stand out are built in hard disk encryption and virtualisation. When you create a volume you can opt to have the appliance encrypt it using 256-bit AES. You provide a password and when, for example, you’re moving the appliance or just want the data secured, you select the lock option, which unmounts the volume and makes its inaccessible. If power is cycled or the appliance rebooted it automatically locks encrypted volumes and won’t allow access until the password is entered.

Virtualisation works when you have multiple appliances acting as master and slaves. Essentially, you create JBODs on a slave and import them into the master which then looks after them as its own. Another useful feature is the ability to expand existing volumes into unused space.

Unfortunately, the NSS2000 didn’t impress in our real world performance tests. Drag and drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip to a Broadberry dual 2.8GHz Xeon X5560 server returned meagre read and write speeds of around 18MB/sec and the FileZilla FTP client utility couldn’t muster more than 19.2MB/sec.

The NSS2000 offers some unusual storage features and the diskless version on review looks good value as after shopping around we found one for less than £300 at Broadband Stuff. Build quality is very good and it’s as quiet as a mouse but performance is pedestrian at best.