- Application Accelerator
- SSD
- HDD
- Large Enterprise Storage
- Medium SAN/NAS (12+ bays)
- Small SAN/NAS (up to 8 bays)
- Backup and Recovery
- Attached Storage
- Storage Adapters
- Networking
- Server Rack
- Server
- Power Management
- Software
- Accessories
March 4th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo SLC Application Accelerator Review (1.2TB)
The Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duo is a full-height, half-length application accelerator that, when paired with SLC NAND, offers 1.2TB of low-latency, high-endurance storage for today's most demanding applications. While branded as a second generation product, the naming is somewhat misleading as Fusion-io has long been a pioneer in the memory-as-storage range with their assorted ioMemory products. That experience shows not just in product development and spec sheet highlights, but all the way through to management as well; Fusion-io boasts the most robust drive management software suite on the market with ioSphere. Still, pretty software and proven drive design are only part of the equation. Enterprises deploy these products with one goal in mind; reduce application response times by attacking storage system latency. The SLC iteration of the ioDrive2 brings laser-focus to this issue, offering read access latency of 47µs and write access latency of 15µs. This compares to read access latency of 68µs in the MLC-based ioDrive2 (they have the same write latency) and while roughly 20µs doesn't sound like much, it can be a virtual eternity for applications that have been tuned for use with flash storage.
February 22nd, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD Constellation ES.3 Review
The Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5" hard drive line is the newly rebranded family of high capacity hard drives of which the Constellation ES.3 is the newest member. The ES.3 is a 7,200 RPM, 3.5" enterprise hard drive with SAS or SATA 6Gb/s interface that's offered in capacities up to 4TB. Seagate didn't just bring a capacity bump to the line though. Compared to the prior generation Constellation ES.2, the ES.3 offers a sustained data rate of 175MB/s, up 13%, and Seagate has doubled the cache from 64MB in the ES.2 to 128MB in the ES.3.
February 20th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Virident FlashMAX II MLC Application Accelerator Review (2.2TB)
The Virident FlashMAX II is a half-height, half-length PCIe application accelerator (AA) that's available with MLC flash media. The FlashMAX II is available in capacities up to 2.2TB, making it the largest available AA in this form factor. As with any product in this class however, density may be nice but ultimately performance is a substantial driver of adoption. The FlashMAX II offers mixed 4K IOPS (75% read, 25% write) of up to 200,000, along with 325,000 4K read IOPS.
February 13th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Micron P400m Enterprise SSD Review
The Micron P400m is an enterprise SSD engineered for use in servers, appliances and storage platforms. The P400m uses a mainstream 7mm 2.5" form factor, SATA interface and Micron's 25nm MLC NAND. Like the P300 this drive replaces, the P400m uses a Marvell drive controller with customized Micron firmware on top that has been tuned for performance under even read and write usage scenarios. From a performance perspective, the P400m delivers 64KB sequential reads and writes of 380MB/s and 310MB/s respectively, with 4KB random read and write IOPS of up to 60,000 and 26,000.
February 11th, 2013 by Doug Crowthers
Synology DiskStation DS1812+ Review
The Synology DS1812+ is a 8-bay NAS designed for a small to medium size business use that features a dual core 2.13GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) software. The entry-NAS market for even the SMB space typically starts at 4-bays, Synology has doubled the drive capacity on its DS1812+. Synology sells their NAS units without disks, so users purchasing the enclosure can add any combination of 2.5" or 3.5" drives they wish.
February 7th, 2013 by Josh Linden
Perm-A-Store Turtle Drive Case Review
Transportation and housing options for bare internal drives are one of the areas of storage technology that has not changed much during the last ten years. For technicians assembling field kits for remote offices, data center administrators storing spare drives, or any other situation calling for safe storage and transport for large quantities of drives, enterprises continue to rely on cardboard boxes with anti-static foam to pack fragile, high-value components. Perm-A-Store’s Turtle hard drive cases provide an alternative.
February 5th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Dell PowerEdge R720 12G Review
The Dell PowerEdge R720 12th Generation is a 2-socket, 2U server that features the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor family and supports up to 768GB of DDR3 memory. Dell offers the R720 in various backplane configurations with up to 16 2.5-inch internal hard drives or 8 3.5-inch drives. A new optional feature though, designed to take the performance compute server market by storm, are 4 hot-plug front-access 2.5-inch Express Flash PCIe SSDs geared for high throughput and incredibly low latency. The PowerEdge R720’s Express Flash connectivity makes it unique among servers of its class and is one of the reasons we have added two R720 units to the lab.
January 29th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Seagate Enterprise Performance 10K HDD Savvio 10K.6 Review
The Seagate enterprise hard drive portfolio is getting a bit of a branding makeover, in this case the high-speed Savvio 10K drives migrate to the Enterprise Performance 10K category. We still know the drives underneath this umbrella by their proper names though, the Savvio 10K.6 being the subject of this review. In many ways, the 10K.6 represents a progressive step forward when compared to the prior generation 10K.5. The biggest highlight though is performance, the Savvio 10K.6 offers sustained throughput of 204MB/s, where the 10K.5 posted 168MB/s, a better than 20% increase. Such speed bumps are more than a nice to have. For many uses cases, like data centers want both performance and capacity in a high-performance storage tier, being able to move away from large form factor 15K drives and low capacity SFF 15K drives is a tremendous win.
January 5th, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Netgear ReadyNAS Surveillance Review
The Netgear ReadyNAS line of SOHO and small business NAS systems offers a robust set of management features, recently enhanced by Netgear's video surveillance offering. The surveillance feature can be enabled via license on current ReadyNAS units, or can be bought in a package complete with ReadyNAS, networking gear and IP video cameras. The system supports up tp 16 cameras per ReadyNAS and provides the end user with web-based management and monitoring tools, along with tools for remote and mobile monitoring via iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices.
January 1st, 2013 by Kevin OBrien
Synology RackStation RS3412xs Review
The Synology RackStation RS3412xs and RS3412RPxs 2U rack mount NAS units offer 10 3.5" drive bays and Synology's robust DiskStation Manager 4.1 (DSM). Synology offers several enterprise-class features, note the RP in the RS3412RPxs stands for redundant power supply, and Synology offers an optional 10GbE card to take advantage of top-line performance of 100,000+ IOPS using SSDs in RAID5. The chassis supports up to 40TB natively with 4TB hard drives, and can scale to 136TB of total capacity using the RX1211 or RX1211RP expansion shelves.
