D-Link ShareCenter Pro 1550 review

The ShareCenter Pro 1550 breaks new ground for D-Link. Aimed at small businesses, this 1U four-bay system is its first rack-mount NAS/IP SAN appliance, with a low-cost file-sharing and backup option, and redundant power supplies.

The appliance is sold diskless, and for testing we installed four 3TB WD Red SATA hard disks. First contact with the web interface loads a wizard, which offers to set them up for you with a single click. The wizard will create one storage pool and one RAID5 logical drive preconfigured for NAS use only. If you want NAS shares and IP SANs you must manually create the logical drives and select NAS or IP SAN usage for each one.

Backup features are extensive: the 1550 supports local backup to USB devices, NAS volume snapshots, replication to another 1550 or rsync-enabled appliance, or the Amazon S3 and Dropbox cloud services. The price includes a five-user copy of Acronis Backup & Recovery Server, which is preset to accept only a D-Link appliance as its remote vault.

D-Link’s ShareCenter NAVI Windows/Mac utility offers backups of selected workstation folders too. Users can create and schedule their own jobs, or use the button on the appliance’s front panel, which kick-starts all NAVI backup jobs with a single press.

Real-world performance is reasonable: copies of a 2.52GB video clip over Gigabit Ethernet returned read and write speeds of 99MB/sec and 92MB/sec. FTP operations were slightly faster, with FileZilla reporting speeds of 103MB/sec and 99MB/sec.

General backup is slower, though: our 17.4GB collection of 10,500 small files copied to the appliance at an average of only 50MB/sec. For IP SANs, the appliance presents one portal so all targets will be shown to any logged-in initiator. Performance is admirable, with Iometer reporting a raw read rate for a 50GB target of 110MB/sec.

For a four-bay rack NAS appliance with redundant power, the ShareCenter Pro 1550 is good value: it’s £250 cheaper than Qnap’s TS-469U-RP. Performance isn’t great, but small businesses will approve of its multitude of backup features.

Author: Dave Mitchell