Nas for small business

[emilm18]

Hi
Im looking for a nas recommendation for small business. Ideally immutable, have been looking and qnas seems to be recommended but as per claude with quts is the way to go. Wanted some real world confirmation of what you all are using and if this feature isnworking as expected or of I should just skip snd go to regular smb shares w out immutability

[david.domask]

Hi Emil, welcome to the forums.

I'm assuming you're planning to use the QNAP with its S3 capabilities, correct?

At small scale, it can work, but we've had many users report challenges with heavier workloads going to the QNAP S3, the system cannot handle the workload.

Do you have some estimates on how many machines / workloads you'll be sending to the QNAP S3?

SMB can work as well, but as you noted you lose immutability, though if the QNAP supports snapshots in the background that can help add a layer of ransomware mitigation. Ideally, iscsi is more stable / performant than SMB / NFS, but largely this depends on your use case.

Depending on the workload going to the QNAP, the S3 option may be viable.

[emilm18]

Thanks for your response.
This is only several vm’s
Budget is a consideration
Looking at approved models for immutable NAS there arent that many options unless im mistaken
Are lower models not supported for S3

[david.domask]

Got it, with only a few VMs, probably a QNAP will work.

You can check our Alliances Integration Page for systems / configurations that have been tested together with our various partners & Veeam to understand known tested configurations.

[vitalii.fesh]

Depends on the budget, but you can consider Ootbi mini.

[david.domask]

@emilm18, minor amendment to previous post -- amount of VMs is still probably fine, but also consider size -- the main concern with budget NAS S3 options is how much workload the API can handle -- Veeam will send ~ 1 million API requests per 1 TB of backup data with standard block size, so for a few nominally sized VMs I would not expect issues, but a 50 TiB VM (or similar volumes of data) may be a bit much for the budget NAS S3.

There's unfortunately no good baseline for "too much for budget", but just keep this in mind.

[karsten123]

i would go for via hardened repository tbh and skip these cheesy prosumer NASes.

[BjoernS]

@karsten123
on what kind of hardware do you use the hardened repository?

[cgsm]

I spent a lot of time looking into this. QNAP, Synology, etc. At the end of the day, we chose a cheaper Dell R-series server and run an immutable/hardened repo on it. Cost a bit more, but you get much better performance, upgradability, and reliability.

[karsten123]

@Bjoern
tbh. we use bigger machines like HPE Alletra storage servers most of the time.
but i think there are smaller options out there which are 1000 times better than a cheap NAS. xfs is such a mature technology. i am also not a big fan of S3 for traditional vm backup.

[ITP-Stan]

Seeing this is a small business with budget limits.

You could go for a Synology DS1525+ and run Virtual Machine Manager with a VM running the Veeam Infrastructure Appliance or the Hardened repository.
That way you get the benefits of XFS with space savings and fast merging.
You can't go for lower priced models NAS, it has to be an x86 CPU and enough RAM to run the Veeam components on it (in a VM).
Of course this is a suggestion for a small workload, couple of VM's and a few TB's like for a small business.

I have used this exact model and method for back-up copies recently.