Untitled Document
Intransa IP5500 Storage Solution
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 5 No 01 - January/February 2005
Fibre channel (FC) SANs have traditionally offered the best combination of
storage performance, capacity and fault tolerance but this commanding lead is
now being seriously challenged by iSCSI. The latest IP5500 Storage Solution from
Intransa brings together all these business critical features but also hits FC
hard in its weakest area as it delivers them at a far lower price.
The system supplied for review included a pair of IP5500 storage controller
modules (SCMs) and a single sixteen bay disk enclosure with 2TB of ATA storage.
The SCMs each have four Gigabit Ethernet ports whilst the disk enclosures come
with dual redundant power supplies plus two dual-port Gigabit Ethernet
controllers and room for two more controller cards as well. An important
features of the IP5500 is that it is capable of presenting an IP SAN to the
network with no single point of failure. IP SANs are created by linking the
network ports on the disk array and two ports on each SCMs to a separate
Ethernet switch. That leaves two ports on each controller with one used to
present the SAN to the world as iSCSI targets and these are connected to a
switch on the LAN. The other port is for administrative access and allows
management traffic to be separated out as an extra security measure.
For testing we used a pair of HP ProCurve Gigabit Ethernet switches and a
management station connected to the same switch as the target ports and test
clients but configured in a different IP subnet. After a quick visit to the CLI
to assign IP addresses to the various ports you then move over to Intransa’s
Java-based StorControl management utility which we found very well designed.
Each hard disk’s physical location in the enclosure is irrelevant as StorControl
views them as global devices allowing drives in different enclosures to be used
in the same RAID array and new enclosures to be added on the fly. The disk
enclosures communicate directly with the SCMs so as soon as a new chassis or
hard disk is added it immediately becomes available.
Realms are used to group together SCMs, disk enclosures and network connections
into a single management domain. After connecting to a storage controller
StorControl displays all devices within the realm and a system view shows the
physical location of each drive, all virtual volumes, used and available storage
in the realm and assigned iSCSI hosts. Creating virtual volumes is a swift
affair as Intransa’s default policies automatically assign them to available
physical disks and you can select striped and mirrored arrays or combination of
both. With mirrored arrays both drives are visible and you can break the mirror
and present both drives as new iSCSI targets. Snapshots provide real-time backup
facilities and these are also visible and can be presented as a new target. Host
systems only see those targets they are allowed to as when a client logs on to
the storage controller their initiator automatically appears in StorControl and
can be assigned to specific targets with appropriate access permissions. With
the SCMs performing load balancing in the background performance over Gigabit
Ethernet is excellent. Using Microsoft’s iSCSI initiator software v1.05 and the
open source Iometer utility we saw raw transfer rates of 109MB/sec with a single
host and a cumulative total of 195MB/sec with two clients logged into separate
virtual volumes.
The IP5500 Storage Solution takes iSCSI firmly into the enterprise as along with
the high levels of fault tolerance it delivers excellent storage capacity and
expansion, comprehensive management tools and the best performance we’ve yet
seen from an iSCSI target device.
Product: IP5500 Storage Solution
Supplier: Intransa
Telephone: 020 7152 4022
Web site: www.intransa.com
Price: As reviewed £36,417 ex. VAT ($70,700)
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