Tandberg Data BizNAS D400 review

Rather than pack its new NAS appliance with features, Tandberg Data has focused on business use. Its BizNAS D400 offers uncomplicated NAS and IP SAN services and teams them up with data-backup and -recovery tools, integration with removable RDX drives and clever Dropbox features.

This quiet, four-bay box has lockable drive trays, and sports dual Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3, five USB 2 and one eSATA port. It’s powered by a modest 1.8GHz Atom D525, and its 2GB of RAM can be upgraded to 4GB with an extra SODIMM.

Tandberg’s web portal makes light work of installation. It discovers the appliance and, once you enter the voucher code in the box, loads a quick-start wizard. It gives sage advice on choosing from stripes, mirrors, RAID5 and RAID6 arrays, and it points out that you need separate volumes for NAS shares and iSCSI targets.

The reduced feature set makes the web interface easy to navigate. Creating NAS shares and iSCSI targets is simple, while for share-access control, the appliance can use local user and group lists or link up with Active Directory.

IP SAN features are basic. You can create targets in any space not used by your share volumes, apply CHAP authentication and restrict access to specific initiators if required. Thin provisioning and LUN backup aren’t available, but performance is fair, with Iometer reporting a 92MB/sec raw read throughout over Gigabit for a 500GB target.

Tandberg’s Dropbox feature supports multiple accounts, allowing businesses to centralise and control all syncing activity on one system. This isn’t a unique feature – Asustor supports one Dropbox account per user linked to their private Home folder – but the BizNAS lets you decide who has access to each one.

We linked the BizNAS to two Dropbox accounts. We assigned dedicated folders to each account, and then used access permissions to decide which groups of Dropbox users could share files among themselves and receive files dropped into the appliances’ folders.

Onboard backup features are a cut above the rest, too. Along with local folder, external drive and rsync backups, you can declare remote CIFS shares on other systems, run backup jobs to and from them, and even between two remote shares. Selecting the System Recovery option for a backup means you can use it to restore the BizNAS OS and RAID array in the event of a disaster. You can then copy back all user data as well.

The Atom held up well in our real-world tests, with copies of a 2.52GB video clip delivering read and write speeds of 96MB/sec and 86MB/sec. FTP speeds jumped to 105MB/sec, and copying our 22.4GB folder with 10,500 small files returned a reasonable 53MB/sec.

For RDX testing, we plugged a Tandberg RDX QuikStor USB 3 drive into the appliance, and ran a backup job to secure our 22.4GB test folder. An EXT4 formatted cartridge returned speeds of 57MB/sec, while an NTFS one managed 50MB/sec.

If you want to gorge on storage features, then similarly priced 4-bay boxes from the likes of Qnap and Synology will satisfy your appetite. For businesses that want a low-cost NAS/IP SAN appliance with good backup features and the best Dropbox support on the market, however, we recommend the BizNAS D400.