Recent reviews from the storage lab

I will be away for the next few days but will return next week with further insights into the ever-evolving storage landscape. Until then, here are links to a few of my most recent storage reviews, including the latest in NAS, FCoE, SSD, and SFF technologies, many of which I have touched on in this column as of late.

Test Center review: BlueArc Titan 3200 is a giant among NAS systems

The Titan justifies a stiff price tag with stellar performance, top-notch scalability, advanced storage management features, and a smooth admin GUI

We don’t have Olympic Games for file server systems but the SPEC SFS (System File Server) benchmark serves as the next best thing, providing a comparable rank of file server performance. If you sifted through all of the SPEC SFS results published to the SPEC Web site, you’d find that the fastest NAS systems are from NetApp, BlueArc, and EMC, who take what in Beijing would have been a gold, a silver, and a bronze medal, in that order.

[ read full review ]

Test Center review: Cisco Nexus 5000 bridges the network gap

Compact switch seamlessly connects Fibre Channel and Ethernet networks

Just about everybody agrees that having a unified network could bring significant financial and administrative benefits, but when exploring possible simplifications to the datacenter fabric, customers faced discouraging and costly options such as tearing down their FC investments or extending the FC network to reach every server and every application.

[ read full review ]

Test Center review: High price makes high-speed Imation SSDs a tough sell

Though resilient, dazzling performers, Imation’s Pro 7000 solid-state drives can’t compete with Western Digital’s VelociRaptor SATA drive for overall value

Solid-state drives (SSDs) have been around for many years. Their high cost, however, has limited their deployment to special environments, such as the military, where their rugged, shock-resilient design, coupled with extremely fast performance, justifies the expense.

[ read full review ]

Test Center review: Infortrend EonStor B12S delivers big with small-form-factor drives

Built around 2.5-inch drives, EonStor B12S storage array yields space and energy savings without skimping on performance and features

Infortrend’s recently released EonStor B12S storage array makes a convincing case for 2.5-inch drives: Instead of housing traditional 3.5-inch disks, it comes with up to 12 SAS (serial attached SCSI) SFF drives. The end result: a system that delivers performance and reliability comparable with large arrays — not to mention a variety of redundancy features — and all within a smaller footprint and with lower energy consumption.

[ read full review ]