A co-worker of mine, Mark, turned me on to this company called QNAP. They make a really dizzying array of SOHO and small/medium business “NetApp” like NAS devices. These little babies support a wide range of protocols including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, ftp, etc. It’s really amazing what these critters can do. So I took the dive, bought one, and it arrived today.
My main purpose is using it for iSCSI LUNs that I can present to my home ESX servers and play with things such as vMotion. I could also share media from it to my Denon receiver, and even have it download torrents.
The unit is still initalizing, so I’ll report in future blogs on my experience. I have an upcoming trip, so it may be a few weeks before I can post and update.
I bought the TS-119 model for $300 from Amazon, minus the hard drive. Free shipping and no tax from Amazon, so I thought that was a great deal. They even have higher end units that are ESX certified, support RAID, and does remote replication.
