Iomega StorCenter px12-450r review

Iomega’s storage appliance line-up has taken on a new lease of life since its acquisition by EMC. The range has increased substantially over the past year, and in this exclusive review, we look at its new flagship – the StorCenter px12-450r.

This 12-bay appliance combines a low-power 2.5GHz Xeon E3-1265L v2 CPU, 8GB of DDR3 memory and plenty of hardware redundancy. Dual 550W hotplug PSUs come as standard, and cooling is handled by four hotplug fans.

The system’s four Gigabit ports support fault-tolerant or load-balanced teams, and Iomega recently announced support for a 10GBase-T adapter card. Fibre adapters aren’t yet on the list, though, and device port choices are minimal, with no USB 3 or eSATA ports.

Iomega offers this appliance diskless or with a choice of storage capacities; we tested the 8TB model. Expansion is limited, since you can’t add additional external drive shelves to the main unit, unlike Netgear’s ReadyDATA 5200.

For setup, Iomega’s Storage Manager discovers the appliance, creates basic shares and maps them to local drive letters. You can view available IP SAN targets and connect to them easily, as Storage Manager does all the hard work with the Windows iSCSI initiator to set up persistent connections.

Storage pools make it easy to expand capacity within the appliance: you insert new drives and add them to existing pools. It’s also possible to convert RAID5 to RAID6, or use new drives to create separate storage pools with their own array type and shared resources.

Workstation backup receives a boost with the new QuikTransfer utility, which protects common user files by copying them to a share on the appliance. You can customise it with your own local folders, set up hourly and daily backup schedules, or have it mirror files by transferring them to the appliance when it detects any changes.

Cloud backup for SMBs is covered by support for Amazon S3, EMC’s Mozy and Iomega Personal Cloud. The latter provides secure data backup and file-sharing to remote users; folders can be accessed as though they’re on the same LAN.