Asustor NAS Storage Servers - From Home Office to Enterprise

I thought today I would go into a bit of detail about Asustor, a relative newcomer to the NAS server market.

Many people don’t know it, but Asustor, as suggested in the name, is actually owned by world renowned motherboard and computer system manufacturer Asus, who have been around since PC’s were PC’s!

They have funnelled their expertise in designing PC’s, Workstations and Server systems into compact, professional and reliable NAS systems, available and suitable for customers on home offices all the way up to corporations with their enterprise grade NAS appliances.

The Asustor NAS systems tick all the boxes;

1. Ease of use and setup. The machine must be able to be setup by a relative networking novice, and be up and working on their network in a day. It’s not unreasonable to expect a beginner to be able to setup a NAS system within half an hour.
   
   
2. Expandability. The system must be easily expanded. It must however be able to function from a relatively basic configuration of disks to suit a customer’s initial budget, and then be able to be expanded to allow for future growth. It must be able to work with the latest drives, such as Western Digital 4TB Red drives – a new firm favourite in the world of NAS ready hard drives.
   
   
3. Reliability. A NAS is designed to be always-on, and therefore should always-be-ready. Not much can be done about hardware failures – they happen, however the build quality of the Asustor NAS boxes are of excellent quality. Internal capacitors are not cheap and the in-built power-supply is of excellent quality. Any internal sources of heat are also tackled by fan cooling and heatsinks, so to increase the life-span of installed drives and the processor board within the NAS. However, should the unit fail then spares are readily available and easy to change in some instances by the user. On the higher-end rackmount ready NAS systems the power supplies are dual redundant, so if one fails the system will not be effected. The failed PSU can be hot-swapped, replacing it with a new unit, again with no downtime to the system.
   
   
4. Integration. As software demands grow, a good NAS must be able to work with all manor of operating systems and be certified for virtualisation technologies. The Asustor NAS range, from simple units all the way up to their enterprise models are Citrix, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V ready. They can also seamlessly integrate with existing Microsoft networks for example.
   
   
5. Support. What’s the use of having an excellent product but when you need support you can’t get it. Everybody has their own personal opinion on support from various manufacturers, however in our customers’ experience we are pleased that Asustor online and telephone based support has been excellent sorting out issues such as incompatibilities, integration problems and more. We have noted their response times are really good.

Why not check out the new Asustor range. Their range is simple – 4 desktop models and currently 4 rackmount models.

I have created a quick breakdown of the models below;

	AS-302T Asustor XBMC AS-302T 2bay Intel ATOM 1.6GHz, 1GB DDR3 2xUSB3, 2xUSB2,1xGigabit Lan, 1xHDMI
	AS-602T Asustor AS-602T 2 Bay Intel Dual-core 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3, 2xeSATA, 4xUSB2, 2xUSB3, 2x Gigabit LAN, 1x HDMI inc BOXEE
	AS-604T Asustor AS-604T 4 Bay NAS DCore 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3, 2xeSATA, 4xUSB2, 2xUSB3, 2x Gigabit LAN, 1x HDMI inc BOXEE
	AS-606T Asustor AS-606T 6 Bay Dual-core 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3, 2xeSATA, 4xUSB2, 2xUSB3, 2x Gigabit LAN, 1x HDMI inc BOXEE
	AS-604RS/RAIL Asustor AS-604RS 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage (USB 3.0, eSATA, 4 Bay, S-ATA 6Gbps, 2x Gigabit, Intel Atom 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3)
	AS-604RD/RAIL Asustor AS-604RD 1U Rackmount Network Attached Storage (USB 3.0, eSATA, 4 Bay, S-ATA 6Gbps, 2x Gigabit, Intel Atom 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3)
	AS-609RS/RAIL Asustor AS-609RS 2U Rackmount Network Attached Storage (USB 3.0, eSATA, 9 Bay, S-ATA, 6Gbps, 2x Gigabit, Intel Atom 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3)
	AS-609RD/RAIL Asustor AS-609RD 2U Rackmount Network Attached Storage (USB 3.0, eSATA, 9 Bay, S-ATA 6Gbps, 2x Gigabit, Intel Atom 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR3)

You can also view the full Asustor line-up here; http://www.servercase.co.uk/our-brands/asustor/

Dozens of customers, new and existing speak to us daily to discuss their NAS server requirements, mainly using Supermicro internals. Just call us on 0800 652 1649 or contact us. Our experience and knowledgeable technical team would be happy to help you from recommend components all the way through to a turnkey enterprise level server platform. We’re always happy to help!