Untitled Document
Nexsan SATABlade
From STORAGE Magazine
Vol 5 No 02 - March 2005
Businesses that think the only way to get top performance from their SAN is
to use fibre channel (FC) or SCSI hard disks should really take a look at Nexsan.
We were impressed with its ATAbeast storage array (see our review in Storage,
Sept/Oct 2004) which showed that low-cost ATA disks can deliver the capacity and
performance demanded by enterprises. The latest SATABlade marks Nexsan’s first
move into Serial ATA territory and our tests reveal that it offers an equally
tempting storage proposition, along with an impressive turn of speed.
Delivered in a slim-line 1U package, the SATABlade provides up to 3.2TB of
storage and teams it up with good fault tolerance. The controller sports a
533MHz 64-bit RISC processor and you can map different LUNs to each of the 2Gbps
FC SFP ports. The embedded RAID controller supports -0, -1, -4, -5, and -10
arrays and is backed up by 512MB of PC2100 ECC cache memory. Two copper Gigabit
Ethernet management ports are also in evidence, but at the time of writing one
was reserved for future use.
The hard disks are loaded from the top panel and slot neatly into the
double-sided backplane that runs down the centre of the chassis. There’s room
for up to eight drives and the review system came supplied with a full
compliment of 400GB Hitachi Deskstar models, each with a simple carrying handle
to facilitate removal and replacement.
Installation is a swift affair and you can start with a local serial port
connection to the slick CLI, which delivers a smart graphical menu with access
to all components and functions. Alternatively, you can point a web browser at
the appliance’s default IP address where you’ll be greeted by a very well
designed interface. It’s virtually identical to that offered by the ATAbeast, so
you can take advantage of the quick-start wizard. This uses all of the drives to
form a RAID-5 array with a single hot-standby, creates a pair of volumes,
assigns them separate LUNs and maps them to different FC ports. Note that the
SATABlade doesn’t support JBODs, but it’s easy enough to select drives, pick a
RAID array and choose an FC port to which it can be mapped.
The home page provides plenty of information about the system and components,
and gives a complete readout on the drives, arrays, volumes, FC ports and power
supplies. If faults are detected, the appliance sounds an internal alarm and can
also send alerts to one email address. Big animated graphics are used throughout
to represent each component, so you can easily see the status of each one.
For testing, we slotted the SATABlade into our FC SAN, built from a QLogic SAN
Connectivity Kit, and linked a pair of dual-Xeon Windows Server 2003 systems
directly to each FC port via QLogic QLA2310 FC HBAs. We configured the
open-source Iometer with two disk workers, 10 outstanding I/Os and 64KB
sequential read operations. With Iometer running on one server, we saw it report
a 185MB/sec average transfer rate - which isn’t far off wire-speed performance
for 2Gbps FC.
We ran the same test on both servers and saw the cumulative average throughput
ramp up to a very healthy 369MB/sec.
Whilst it’s true that FC or SCSI disk arrays have a slight edge on performance,
it’s difficult to see how the higher expenditure can be justified, as the
differences in raw throughput are now minimal.
The SATABlade looks an ideal candidate for SAN storage, as it offers a very high
storage density at a price that’s hard to beat and backs it up with plenty of
fault tolerance and quality remote management tools.
Product: SATABlade
Supplier: Nexsan Technologies
Tel: 01332 291600
Web site: www.nexsan.com
Price: As reviewed, £6,595
|
