Paul Ferrill

Everywhere you look these days you’ll find articles on virtualized something or other. It’s definitely in vogue to find a way to virtualize a function previously restricted to dedicated hardware. This certainly applies to storage and has found its way into a number of different products. The big distinction here is the ability to provide […]

Managing large storage systems is not a trivial problem for many IT administrators. The problems only multiply as the storage capacity and users go up. Management becomes even more problematic when you mix systems from a variety of vendors. Most storage vendors do provide software for managing and monitoring the various aspects of the underlying […]

It’s hard for many IT managers to even consider using open source software to handle anything remotely critical to running the business. That especially applies to storing company files in a reliable and manageable fashion. But choosing open source as a platform does offer some help in solving both budget and user needs. In the […]

When it comes to NAS units for small and medium-sized businesses, you have a couple of different form factor options. First, there is rack-mounted storage, which has pretty much reached the commodity stage at this point in time. You can buy a 2U or 3U storage rack with support for up to sixteen disks. On […]

Choosing the right disk drives for enterprise duty depends a lot on the tasks you need them to support. It’s no secret that Solid State Disks (SSDs) offer significant speed and power improvements over their rotating media competition. The dig on SSDs has been centered on cost and reliability. Many off-the-shelf SSDs have problems with […]

When last we looked at the QNAP TurboNAS, we evaluated an 8-bay unit and found it to be suitable for most small-to-medium business needs. This time, we will examine the TS-1279U-RP, a 12-bay storage unit with most of the same hardware components as the smaller-capacity 8-bay unit. Both come in a 2U size rack-mount box […]

Managing hard drive partitions is not something you need to do every day. Windows 7 has the ability to shrink partitions but that’s about it. Hence, if you need to enlarge a partition, you’ll have to look elsewhere for the functionality. One viable option is Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Professional. There are a number […]

Once upon a time in the land of IT administrivia, storage was a precious commodity that had to be closely guarded for fears of exceeding available capacity. Then came the days of huge, cheap disk drives, and the guardians of IT administrivia no longer had to worry about running out of space. Then, the Big […]

In a world where hardware consolidation is on the mind of every IT manager, it’s not surprising to see that trend influence the latest versions of storage products like the QNAP TS-879U-RP Turbo NAS. The key to getting more functionality out of this box is in the hardware underneath. An Intel Dual Core i3-2120 3.3 […]