I still love the ix4-200d NAS, but there are a few things that got left out of the owner's manual that I had to figure out by trial and error.

1. Rsync only works against unsecured (wide open public) folders.
2. If you need secured folders to keep your vital files from being accidentally moved/touched/altered/deleted, using CIFS sharing will enable the security, but you may find that file copy or sync operations take longer than just an rsync operation due to additional overhead in the protocol. SMB signaling can get loused up quickly on a slow or unreliable link.
3. If you absolutely need to move large files between two of these at geographically distant locations, you can set up an rsync or copy operation to a USB-attached hard drive, mail that drive to the other location and rsync them from the drive to the destination folder. A poor-man's workaround for keeping fulls and incrementals in sync when the line just won't pass enough traffic to suit.
4. Turn off the power saving on the hard disks. Nice idea, but it takes almost a minute to spin all of the drives up so that the share becomes usable. Unless you really love watching the Windows hourglass spin...
   

A client wanted to set up a backup solution for their VMware environment. My preference on the backup software itself was Vizioncore's vRangerPro software, but I couldn't immediately name a storage device. I've played with the Buffalo Terastation and I have a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ for my home storage but they both are lacking horsepower being that they are just larger NAS devices.

Another blog pointed out the arrival of the ix4 series from Iomega, which is now owned by EMC, which also owns a large chunk of VMware. Nice synergy, right?

So, not only will the client get a storage device that is built well, supports rsync for offsite replication and offers a good chunk of storage, but they'll also have a DR-worthy pair of devices to use if needed. A thread on the VMware forums seems to support using one of these to run several, if not a dozen, somewhat demanding VMs via iSCSI or NFS mounts. Nice bonus.

The only disappointment is expected: I was hoping for block-level replication, not file-level. I know rsync is file-level, but I was hoping that some of EMC's data de-dupe functionality would trickle down and make the periodic full backups easier to handle.

Update: So much for good testing. The ix4 does support block-level replication, so only the changed portion of a file gets pushed across. Serves me right for using entirely different contents for a file of the same name. Don't do this at home, folks.