As IT contemplates the rapidly expanding universe of storage options, at least one detail has become clear: In the majority of infrastructures, most data just sits around, feeling lonely, while a small percentage is more or less constantly in use. Addressing this issue in an elegant and cost-saving way paves the road to lower capital expenditures for storage, as well as reduced power and cooling costs, with a side order of performance gains. What's not to love?

EMC is easily the largest enterprise storage player on the planet, with more worldwide storage revenue than its two closest competitors (IBM and NetApp) combined. But no matter how popular EMC's high-end Symmetrix and VNX product lines have been with large customers, EMC was rarely considered a great choice for the small-to-midsize-business sector.

I've seen a number of QNAP NAS arrays over the years, and the TS-EC1279U-RP is the best of the bunch so far. Previous iterations were solid performers for the price, but they lacked features that would bring them to the next level. This has been sorted out with the QNAP TS-EC1279U-RP.

The six-bay Iomega StorCenter px6-300d is the largest array you can get from Iomega before you venture into rack-mount servers, and it's just the kind of box you'd expect to see in a remote office or small to medium-sized business. Considering Iomega's parent EMC is a leader in the enterprise storage market, I had high expectations for this solution.

Netgear is the leader in this segment of the NAS market, and it's easy to see why. The hardware is solidly built, and the software makes it quick and simple for almost anyone to get up and running quickly. Netgear also offers a wide variety of backup solutions to fit your needs. And while many of the competitors in this playing field are taking "everything but the kitchen sink" approaches, Netgear seems to be more clearly focused on the business customer.

The QNAP Turbo NAS became my favorite during the testing. What this unit lacks in special cloud features (see the Iomega and Netgear reviews), it makes up in performance and solid functionality. My feeling is that the QNAP would be best suited to a company that has a little more tech knowledge on hand, so the staff could take advantage of all that this box can do. The hardware is solid, and setup and administration are well documented and easy to manage, but with all of the functionality that this box offers, I'm not sure I'd give it to a nontechnical business user.

I bought my first Synology NAS in 2006 -- the CS-406. The box was small, quiet, and better than the PC I was using as a do-it-myself file server. Speed was good and the product was well-designed. Much has changed in Synology products over the past six years, some for the good and some for the bad. The hardware is still solid and performance is still great, but I'm not sure I would recommend this NAS to a nontechnical business user. Other products in this class make setup and ongoing backup much easier.

The entry-level NAS market is red hot. With prices dipping below $2,000 for a versatile storage server packing 10TB of disk, there's no wonder this market segment is witnessing extremely fast growth. Unfortunately for the business customer, it's also experiencing a lot of confusion.