JON HONEYBALL

Continuing his flirtation with Ubiquiti devices, Jon welcomes its NAS solution into the lab – but is less impressed by Microsoft bundling Copilot into Office 365 Family with a bump in price

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Jon Honeyball Opinion on Windows, Apple and everything in between – p110

Lee Grant Tales from the front line of computer repair – p113

Olivia Whitcroft Lawyer Olivia offers legal advice for the tech industry – p116

Davey Winder Keeping small businesses safe since 1997 – p118

Steve Cassidy The wider vision on cloud and infrastructure –p120

W hat sort of storage do you need, both in your home and in your business? Larger organisations have many choices, with multiple enterprise solutions available. These have a whole range of capability requirements that are well outside the scope of the home and SME marketplace: it is, quite simply, a different world.

But choices in the SME space are interesting. The standard play here is a network attached storage (NAS) device to which all the clients connect, usually via SMB protocol. This covers all the day-to-day operation of laptops, desktops and servers. However, in the server space, you will often need iSCSI – and NFS, for those who have longer memories – to provide a more efficient block-level connection to storage.

The NAS itself has changed shape, too. In the past, it was essentially a big box of disks with a relatively simple controller, feeding out the storage in a managed way using the required protocols. By “in a managed way”, I mean that it’s vital to slice and dice the storage between multiple users, and to do so in a coherent and secure fashion. This requires user account management, permissions and groups, plus the means to properly audit the settings.

However, there has been a move to make NAS boxes into much more than mere storage. Now we expect to run services on them, and this can be anything from traditional server functions such as mail and DNS services through to exotic capabilities such as surveillance video. More recently we’ve seen the rise of virtualisation capabilities such as Docker, along with full virtual machine services. So a modern NAS is often a full-blown server offering services and capabilities onto the network.

The need for that big box of disks hasn’t gone away, however, because there has been an almost inevitable rise in prices of NAS-as-server products to cover the cost of the expanding features.