Inside Guide: Making the Most of NAS for Backup
Inside Guide: Making the Most of NAS for Backup
What's this
Network-attached storage can serve in many roles across the wide spectrum of organizations, but a recent survey conducted on Tom’s Hardware revealed “backup” as the top NAS application across users in all environments. That’s not to say that all respondents are actively using NAS for backup. Some are considering it; others remain interested in finding ways to better employ the NAS they have in service.
One might expect a company such as Seagate to endorse NAS for everyone, but project manager and technical trainer Roger Eckrode maintains that operations with less than 10 GB of data can get along quite well without NAS. Up to this point, it’s easy enough to keep data synchronized across local drives within a workgroup or business, and 10 GB isn’t much of a bite out of modern drive capacities. Importantly, 10 GB doesn’t carry much of a time penalty even if restored from the cloud. Restore times, as we will see, are a critical factor in NAS decisions.
Beyond 10 GB of active data, the need for NAS quickly climbs. A typical organization will engage in too much data sharing, and bottlenecks will begin to set in around the network and users’ workflow. Often, one system will end up with a disproportionate amount of the data being accessed, and this system’s performance will begin to suffer as more of its resources get allocated to servicing networked users at the expense of the local user and his or her other applications. At this point, a NAS starts to make more sense than any direct-attached solution ever will.

In the following pages, we’ll explore the backup side of NAS and examine not only the different hardware aspects but also configuration considerations and software options. Most of all, we want you to finish here with a better understanding of how NAS can help solve your real backup needs and how easy it can be to achieve an affordable, effective solution.