Information covered

Purpose

Learn about creating and hosting NAS and iSCSI shares within your IDrive BMR local storage.

Description

The IDrive BMR device supports hosting and backup of NAS and iSCSI shares via the feature Network shares. Creating a NAS or an iSCSI share within the IDrive BMR device is easy and does not require any additional setup or software installation.

You can create a NAS share and enable data access over file-based sharing protocols, including SMB for Windows, NFS for Unix-like operating systems, and AFP for Mac. Also, you have SFTP for ssh-based file sharing. You can create an iSCSI share when you need the storage targets to appear as virtual hard disks on virtual machines.

Choosing the type of network share: NAS or iSCSI

Based on your data storage requirement, you can choose to create either a NAS or an iSCSI share.

The primary difference between the two networks shares is their data storage architecture and accessibility:

NAS shares follow object-level storage which is suitable for sharing files and folders. They are accessible as mapped drives on the computers.
iSCSI shares follow block-level storage and the storage architecture is on the network, rather than the computer. In the case of Windows OS, the iSCSI initiator can display the shares on the IDrive BMR device as local drives on the computers on the same LAN.

Host unlimited network shares

There is no limit to the share size or the number of network shares you can have on the IDrive BMR device. The network shares are created within your IDrive BMR local storage, therefore, you may need to monitor your local storage utilization to ensure seamless performance.

Go to Statistics > Storage insight > Network shares for details of storage utilization of your NAS and iSCSI shares on the IDrive BMR device.

SSD-HDD hybrid storage

The storage of the IDrive BMR device is designed to strike a balance between offering better performance and higher storage capacity. This is done by ensuring that the critical components (operating system, virtual memory, core backup application, etc.) of the device are running on high-performing SSD storage, while the actual data is stored on high-storage-capacity-enabled HDD drives. The hybrid storage environment provides both performance and capacity at a competitive price.

Backup security for NAS and iSCSI shares

You can achieve data protection by maintaining a local backup of your data on the IDrive BMR device via local snapshots. Your IDrive BMR network shares data is encrypted at rest using AES 256 CCM/AES 256 GCM.