Opening the Zetera box

One of the hottest things I ran into this year comes from a startup company in California, Zetera, and is a completely new twist on networked storage.

I mentioned Zetera in two of my Storage Insider columns, in February

when they first left stealth mode, and in June, when they made a joint distribution agreement with a storage software company, DataPlow.

Why am I mentioning Zetera again now? Because Netgear is about to launch Storage Central SC101, the first product based on that technology, actually the combined technologies from DataPlow and Zetera, and I have one in my lab for an early peek.

SC101 is an entry-level product, but I can’t wait to see this new UDP-based storage networking in action. Interested to know how it went?

Then let’s go.The box carries both the Zetera and Netgear logos, as it is the result of their partnership. It’s essentially add-on storage for consumers and SOHO users but, differently from other products in that space this two-brick sized box connects to your Ethernet network and not to one of the ports on your PC.

On the front, three led to monitor power, disk activity and network activity. Removing the front cover reveals slots for two 3.5″ IDE disk drives.

I have two 160 GB Maxtor drives waiting for a mission just like this and, after setting their jumpers to “cable select”, in they go. The two drives slide in their slots with a snug fit and without requiring screws to secure them to a chassis.

The space around those two slots is indeed very tight and I hope that the heat will be properly dissipated through the two 3″ wide aluminum grids that run across the top and the bottom of the box.

However, four small feet keep the unit 3/4″ above my desk and the installation instructions suggest (appropriately) to be sure and keep that space clear.

I connect the RJ45 cable to my 1GbE switch and power on. In addition, I install Storage Central Manager, the management software, on my XP machine. It runs also on Windows 2000 but the latest SP is a requirement for both OSes.

Storage Central Manager runs in “wizard” or in “expert” mode. Choosing wizard gives the choice between creating a new volume, changing properties for a volume, or mounting an existing volume.

After clicking my obvious choice, “create”, the GUI opens a screen listing my two drives with an IP address attached to each of them.

It’s easy to retrace what happened: for each drive the Zetera chip acquired an IP address from my DHCP server. I have now two networked drives, visible from any machine on my LAN, and both addresses respond to my ping.

Back to creating my new volume, I select one of the drives and click next: The wizard reminds me which drive I have chosen and how much space I have left on it, then asks for a name and how big I want the new volume to be.

Plain stuff so far, but the next question is “do I want mirroring?”, and when I answer yes, the wizard proposes to mirror the content of the new volume on the second physical drive in Storage Central.

Obviously mirroring is expected to preserve the volume content if one of the drives fails, a feature that I ‘m going to test later on.

The next question is “do I want to share the new volume?” . Answering “yes” will make the volume accessible also from other computers, as long as they are on the same LAN and run Storage Central Manager.

Answering “no” is the selfish choice that will restrict using the new volume to just this machine. I answer yes, then yes again when asked if I want to password-protect my new volume: users from other machines will have to enter the correct password to gain access.

After a few minutes my new volume appears under My Computer in Windows Explorer and at the same time Storage Central tells me which letter has been assigned to it.

From Windows Explorer I launch a copy of numerous files to the new volume, then, while the copy is still running, I install the management application on another machine.

I then mount the same volume also on my second machine and open one of the files: the first machine is still copying other files, unaffected by what I am doing on the other PC.

Differently from other SANs(storage area network), the Zetera approach makes sharing files easier rather than more complicated, which is a major plus for the target audience of the SC101. In fact, sharing a volume with Zetera is easier than using the standard Windows tools.

Looking at my clock, the elapsed time since I started installing the software on the first machine is only a few minutes, which is an indication of how easy and quick was adding a micro-SAN to my LAN.

I use the term micro-SAN loosely, because according to Zetera a network based on these “bricks” can expand up to 128 PB (petabytes).

Should I dismiss that claim as theoretical or just marketing blast? Perhaps, but it’s undeniable that I can add a drive for each IP address my DHCP server can dish out.

Even using low capacity say, 120GB drives this “micro-SAN” can potentially scale extremely well, probably larger than any user will ever dream to deploy.

Starting early September you should be able to buy one from one of the major retail outlets (think Fry’s CompUSA, Staples).

I promised not to spill the beans about price before then, so I’ll leave my comments on that for another post, together with more testing experience and some pros and cons.

Meanwhile, please let me have your comments.