Saturday, August 20, 2011

Find The Best Network Attached Storage For Your Business Data

By Lawrence Edwards


In business you naturally need to save money when acquiring computer hardware, just like other purchases. Bear in mind, though, that in business your information can be your financial life blood. Lose the data, lose your business.

That is the reason why you would like to fight the temptation to buy the least expensive network attached storage with the least expensive hard drives installed. Somebody may tell you that with RAID, usually found in most business NAS products, you can buy cheap and get away with it but that's not quite true.

Yes, RAID will shield you against drive failure, but only as long as the following two statements are true:

First, you need to be cautioned of the disk failure immediately, or ideally, informed of the upcoming problem before it even takes place.

Second, you have to take action and replace the failed hard drive before there are another hard drive failures. And yes, multiple drive failures in short amounts of time can happen. One way this is more prevalent is when you have matching hard drives from the same production lot or batch. If there's a defect in the one, there may be a fault in another.

So how do your defend your information and your firms future when shopping for the best network attached storage?

Here are one or two suggestions:

One thing you can do is buy a business NAS that's made with the intention you wil use it for. The Netgear ReadyNAS Pro offerings of 2 drive NAS, 4 drive NAS and even a 6 drive NAS are designed with protecting business information in mind.

Prepopulated hard drives in the ReadyNAS Pro 4 and ReadyNAS 6 are enterprise class hard drives designed for heavier usage and less sure to fail to begin with. If you buy your own hard drives, stick with enterprise class.

The unit will alert you not only of a hard drive failure but also alert you when conditions are consistent with a possible approaching failure. For even more piece of mind, get the Netgear ReadyNAS 6 configured with RAID6, X-RAID2 with dual redundancy. With this configuration, three drives must fail before you suffer lost data!

Monitor your email account for notifications or login to the NAS console to keep on top of any such alerts.

A hint of the quality of a product is how long the vendor is willing to stand behind it for. Unlike a consumer NAS, the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro carries a five year warranty.




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