Iomega StorCenter px12-450r review

For bigger businesses, there’s support for EMC’s Atmos-hosted storage service. The StorCenter px12-450r also runs EMC’s Avamar client, which deduplicates data at source, providing it’s backed up to a central Avamar data store.

The appliance’s Copy Job option is similar to the backup features offered with Netgear’s ReadyNAS appliances. It schedules copies of folders from one network device to another, and neither the source nor the destination has to be the appliance itself. Copy Jobs can also be configured to use rsync, so you can replicate from one compliant appliance to another. Speeds aren’t impressive, though: we replicated a 22.4GB mix of data from a StorCenter px2-300d to a share on the review system, recording average speeds of only 30MB/sec.

For general NAS and IP SAN operations, however, this system is fast. Using a Dell PowerEdge R515 server running Windows Server 2012, we saw drag-and-drop copies of a 2.52GB video clip return read and write speeds of 103MB/sec. FTP operations were slightly faster, with FileZilla reporting upload and download rates over Gigabit of 107MB/sec. Even our small-file copy test didn’t flummox it, with the 22.4GB test sample of 10,500 files copying to the px12-450r at a rapid 72MB/sec. IP SAN speeds are also up to the limits of Gigabit, with Iometer reporting 113MB/sec read and write rates for a 500GB target.

For surveillance, Iomega has replaced its own solution with the SecureMind Surveillance Manager, which represents a significant improvement on previous models. Along with support for more IP camera models, it adds motion-detection triggers. However, only one camera licence is included; an extra four-pack costs £110.

Another new feature is virus scanning, which comes courtesy of McAfee’s VirusScan Enterprise for Linux. This has its own management console, where real-time scanning can be carried out and scans for selected shares can be initiated.

With the 8TB model costing £3,201, Iomega’s StorCenter px12-450r is good value when compared with Netgear’s ZFS-powered ReadyDATA 5200 and the Windows-powered 12big Rack Network from LaCie.

The lack of snapshot facilities and external expansion are drawbacks, but this appliance is extremely fast, making it an ideal central backup system for SMBs.