In any contemporary discussion about small business storage technology, the term “cloud” is likely to come up often enough to make a meteorologist feel at home. Cloud storage has many benefits — notably easy access to your data from anywhere there’s an Internet connection — but it also comes with things your small business may not want, such as the need to transfer your data offsite into the custody of a third party and then paying a monthly charge to access it.
Iomega’s StorCenter ix4-200d Cloud Edition network attached storage device gives small businesses a way to establish their own cloud of sorts — without giving up possession and control of their data. Moreover, it offers a method of data access that’s simple and consistent whether you’re on the company network or somewhere outside the confines of the office.
NAS Hardware Features
The StorCenter ix4-200d Cloud Edition comes housed in a compact, cube-shaped case and available in 4, 8, and 12 TB models that cost $799, $1,099, and $1,599, respectively. Regardless of capacity, all ix4-200d models include four SATA II hard drives set up in a default RAID 5 configuration, which means about a quarter of the overall capacity is set aside to store the parity data that lets the unit recover from a failed drive without any data loss.
In RAID 5, our 8 TB test unit offered roughly 6 TB of usable capacity. The ix4-200d can also be used in RAID 10 (50 percent of space set aside for data redundancy) or in non-redundant configurations that can use the unit’s full capacity.
The ix4-200d’s hard drives aren’t quite as easy to access as on some other NAS units. Instead of being located behind a front-panel door, you need to pop off the ix4-200d’s case to get at the pull-out drive trays within. But removing the case isn’t a major hassle, as it involves only two large thumbscrews and requires no tools. The drives aren’t hot-swappable, so you need to power down the unit before replacing one.
What you do get on the ix4-200d’s front panel is a small but easy-to-read LCD display that cycles through basic unit info — time and date, a capacity gauge, and the unit’s name and IP address. The ix4-200d sports a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be used independently for increased data throughput or bonded together to provide a redundant network connection in the event one of the ports should fail.
To accommodate external storage, the ix4-200d offers three USB 2.0 ports — two on the back and one on the front, though we would have preferred at least one higher-performance eSATA or USB 3.0 port as well. We do like the QuikTransfer feature, which lets you transfer the contents of an external drive to a specified folder on the ix4-200d with only a couple of quick button presses.
Cloud Connectivity
The ix4-200d (like many other NAS products in the StorCenter family) now sports a feature that Iomega calls a Personal Cloud. In a nutshell, it lets the ix4-200d maintain a direct and secure link via the Internet to a network of other devices, which can include PCs, mobile devices or other network-enabled Iomega storage drives. Although Iomega maintains an online service necessary for members of the cloud to locate and connect to each other, the company doesn’t charge a subscription fee and says that data stored on the ix4-200d is neither replicated on nor transferred through Iomega’s servers.
Setting up a cloud on the ix4-200d is very simple, and should require little more than giving it a name of up to 20 characters (no spaces, punctuation, or symbols allowed). If your broadband router supports UPnP, the ix4-200d should be able to configure the necessary port forwarding on its own. If not, or if you have special network circumstances such as Double NAT (more than one router handling the network address translation), you’ll have to manually forward a single port — namely 50500, though you’re free to change the port number.
The ix4-200d offers two options to encrypt communications between the ix4-200d and the devices that link to it; the default option, Medium, is a 64-bit DES-based encryption scheme, while High employs stronger 128-bit AES.
Once you establish the Personal Cloud on the ix4-200d, you can send out membership invitations to employees, clients, partners, etc. via email directly from the unit’s browser-based administrative console. The email invitations contain a link to Iomega’s Storage Manager access software that’s embedded with a unique access code which, upon installation, automatically configures the software to connect to the specified cloud.
This makes it easy to set up clients since the recipient doesn’t need to know any particulars like an URL for the ix4-200d or even the name of the cloud. At the moment, the Storage Manager software is available for Windows, Mac and about a half-dozen flavors of Linux systems. On the mobile device front, an Apple iOS version is due out in mid-May, and one for Android is scheduled to follow around the end of June.
