Sabio Does SMB Storage With a Few Hiccups

(This review was done by Brandon Sutherlin of the ANCL Lab, so be nice people — Oliver)

By Brandon Sutherlin

Sabio’s CM-4 storage appliance is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. But while it does its job as a data storage appliance, other parts of the package still need some work. We looked at two versions of this box, a basic box and a later one equipped with Blackball’s SearchIn search/indexing software.

Out of the box, the CM-4 looks like a tall silver lunchbox without the handle. Its weight might make you wish that it did have that handle. The front-mounted plastic door has a barrel lock, which would deter dangerous hard disk thieves for several minutes. The physical interface is trained-monkey simple with numbered slots that correspond to four numbered drive bays. Although, since it doesn’t really matter which order you put them in for initial set up, why confuse yourself?

Speaking of initial setup, the latest version of this process is simpler than the first. In the first version, we had to use the USB connection, which was less convenient because the cord wasn’t long enough. The current edition, however, uses an Ethernet connection, so at least the cord problem was solved.

Configuring the rest of the device, however, is an exercise in the Zen of waiting. Once discovery is completed, Sabio’s user interface looks relatively straightforward. Little problems taunted us, like configuring permissions for shared volumes, but with a little help from tech support we squirmed on past. The major problem was the time required per user input. Whether selecting a different menu option or changing share permissions, there’s a truly aggravating lag between responses.

Where is the CM-4 best suited? Small or medium businesses, no doubt. The device offers up to a terabyte of storage which could be enough for a large business to perform routine back-ups & restores as well as a gig NIC for speedy data transfer. That sounds fast on paper, but in real life that “Powered By Java” user interface gets in the way. Java’s portability is great, but the Sabio UI still falls victim to the notorious lag of virtual machine translation combined with real-time processing. Configuring the CM-4 reminds us of nothing so much as surfing the Web over a 28.8K dial-up connection.

Because we were in testing mode, we spent most of our experience with the CM-4 from that perspective. Sabio points out that most users won’t. They also said that their implementation of the UI doesn’t use cached info of any kind–everything is presented in real-time, which makes the time delay problem a bit worse. But Sabio does this so that all information presented is always the most recent and accurate (handy for indexing, we suppose). Okay, but still, the prospect of configuring the device for a large number of users even for a one-time setup made us want to develop a smoking habit to either tolerate the waiting or die sooner.

Past the UI, however, there are some niceties to look forward to. Chief is the BlackBall SearchIn indexing software we received with the second box. This software is fast; so fast it actually made us smile. Blackball installed without issues and so far has worked as designed. The search engine supports quite a diverse array of file types with room to include the ever growing list via software updates. The ability to search using metadata fields is an interesting and useful addition especially for those of us who only remember bits and pieces of information.

To test SearchIn a bit, we uploaded two semesters of Java code and proceeded to search for method calls, import statements, variable names, you name it. Blackball’s app found it all. Not only that, we searched right after uploading, thinking perhaps that the content wouldn’t be indexed yet but SearchIn found everything immediately.

One thing to note about SearchIn’s indexing is that it may need a little tweaking. Index scanning can be resource greedy and time consuming, which is expected; but there is an option of scanning when the machine is idle. You’ll need to experiment with this to see how best the indexing feature works for you. Also pay attention to your share assignments because the whole volume is public by default.

But while we liked SearchIn for the most part, the CM-4 still had a few other issues we only encountered after using it for a while. Security is one. Adequate, but there’s room for improvement. The UI has a self-signed certificate for HTTPS access, which is better than authenticating in the clear but “Allow anonymous FTP” is enabled by default. Why? Because the box doesn’t support Secure FTP access, though Sabio says it’s considering adding that for future versions.

Assuming the device is on a LAN behind a firewall, this seems adequate. But we would have liked to have seen some kind of remote access support for accessing files securely from outside the firewall. That’s not rocket science in this day and age, and most of Sabio’s competitors are including similar features.

Overall, we found the Sabio CM-4 to be uable, but with definite need for certain improvements. The UI was enough of an impedance that we view it as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an aid in configuration. On the other hand, it’s worth suffering through simply for the SearchIn software. And, once you past config, you also get a healthy amount of storage capacity with RAID for data integrity security.

CM-4

Sabio

: $955 (street with 1TB installed)

Verdict: A usable storage appliance marred by a dog-slow install process balanced by a fast and accurate indexing solution.

Brandon Sutherlin is the student lab assistant at the Advanced Network Computing Lab at the University of Hawaii. He’s considered a smart person with a great personality marred only by his placing Suzuki higher than Ducati on the motorcycle food chain.