Enterprise Storage Reviews

Enterprise disk, hybrid and all flash array (AFA) reviews that cater to midmarket enterprises and up.

August 9th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

NetApp AFF A200 Review

The NetApp AFF A200 is a 2U all-flash storage array that provides an attractive entry point to NetApp's enterprise flash storage portfolio. The AFF A200 features 24 front-mounted 2.5-inch drives managed by dual controllers, and powered by six-core Intel Broadwell-DE processors. The A200 can be accessed with either SAN or NAS workloads (or both). The AFF A200 supports SSDs up to 15TB in capacity, allowing a single array to be outfitted with up to 367TB of raw storage, with additional space available via the DS224C expansion shelf.

July 14th, 2017 by Brian Beeler

Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 Overview: Flash Native Storage

Huawei launched their OcenStor Dorado V3 last fall during their HUAWEI CONNECT annual event in Shanghai, China. We were on hand for the launch and were able to learn first hand of Huawei’s vision for the next generation of SSD adoption in the enterprise. Huawei describes this as the fourth generation of flash storage, where all flash arrays are not only able to take full advantage of SSD media to deliver excellent latency; they’re also able to leverage data reduction technologies to ensure cost-effective capacity delivery targets are made in a relatively small rack footprint.

March 27th, 2017 by Lyle Smith

Synology RackStation RS3617xs Review

The Synology RackStation RS3617xs is a 12-bay NAS solution built for high-performance for demanding business applications, and helps businesses centralize their storage, simplify data management, and seamlessly deploy virtualization solutions. The RS3617xs comes equipped with four Gigabit ports, dual PCIe 3.0 x8 slots that can host 10GbE NICs, and supports SSD cache for improved throughput.

February 9th, 2017 by Mark Kidd

Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0 Review

The Backblaze Storage Pod 6.0 accommodates 60 hard drives in a 4U rackmount server, with an architecture that puts the emphasis on storage density and price-per-GB. The Storage Pod 6.0 design is the result of an open-source hardware-development process that allows administrators the choice of purchasing a pre-built server or building their own to the same specifications.

January 17th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell EMC SC9000 Review

The Dell EMC SC9000 is Dell’s highest-performing all-flash and hybrid-storage-server solution of the SC Series, built on the legacy of the PowerEdge family and leveraging the latest Storage Center Operating System 7. During the last several months, the StorageReview Enterprise Test Lab has put the SC9000 through our application benchmark protocol to understand how it performs with real-world workloads. Our review also explores the ways that the SC9000 and SCOS 7 fit into Dell EMC’s evolving midrange storage ecosystem, which includes the SC Series and Unity products.

January 12th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Spectra Verde Review

Spectra Logic’s Verde with Archive SMR drives (formerly Verde DPE and now incorporated into the existing Verde product line) is a secondary file storage platform offering solution capacities ranging from 48TB up to an eye-popping 7.1PB of raw storage. Leveraging the existing Spectra Verde Family hardware combined with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disks, the Verde offers affordable (as low as $0.075/GB) high-capacity storage for enterprise, bulk storage, archive, unstructured data, large files, random reads, bulk deletes, and files that will need infrequent changes. The Verde head units are available in both 2U or 4U form-factors, with 4U expansion shelves offered to reach the PB+ capacity ranges that few other platforms offer at this price range.

November 17th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dot Hill AssuredSAN 6004 Review

We've long been fans of the Dot Hill arrays, looking at a few over the years including the AssuredSAN 4824 and the AssuredSAN Ultra48 in both HDD and hybrid configurations. In fact, the Ultra48 never made its way home; it's been in our lab serving as a primary capacity array for some time now. Dot Hill was good about continuing to add features to their controllers, making them some of the best in midrange storage. After the Seagate purchase of Dot Hill mid last year (podcast on the topic), the updates have continued flowing; at the end of last year Seagate pushed out a release that dramatically improved the performance of the 6004 series controllers, amongst several other material updates. This got us to thinking about how much more performance could be squeezed out of the Ultra48 with a relatively simple controller swap. Given Seagate's interest in delivering a fully vertically integrated storage array, the timing seemed right to give it a try.

September 27th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

SUSE Enterprise Storage Review

SUSE Enterprise Storage is a software-defined storage solution powered by Ceph designed to help enterprises manage the ever-growing data sets. Further, SUSE aims to help by taking advantage of favorable storage economics as hard drives continue to get larger and flash prices continue to fall. While typically configured as a hybrid, Ceph is ultimately as flexible as the customer's demand it to be. While much of the software-defined gusto these days is focused on primary storage and hyperconverged offerings, Ceph is helping to fuel significant hardware development as well. HP, Dell, Supermicro and others have all invested heavily in dense 3.5" chassis with multiple compute nodes in an effort to provide the underlying hardware platforms Ceph requires. In the case of this particular review, we leveraged HPE gear including ProLiant servers and Apollo chassis, but SUSE Enterprise Storage can be deployed on just about anything.

August 28th, 2016 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Mangstor NX6325 NVMf Array Review

The Mangstor NX6325 NVMe Over Fabrics (NVMf) shared storage array offers up to 21.6TB of flash storage in an HP DL380 2U server. Like the NX6320 we reviewed earlier this year, the NX6325 aggregates Mangstor's add-in card (AIC) NVMe drives and shares them out over the network. This enables latency sensitive applications to take advantage of all the great benefits of NVMe storage, without needing to have an AIC inside every server. When paired with the Mellanox SN2700 100GbE switch and ConnectX4 (Ethernet or InfiniBand), the NX6325 has impressive capabilities, offering up reported read performance of 12GB/s and writes of 9GB/s out of a single array.

August 3rd, 2016 by Brian Beeler

ClearSky Data Review

The enterprise storage market is often viewed as a bifurcation between some form of traditional data center architecture or cloud-based solutions. ClearSky Data plays in the space in between, offering data center style responsiveness and data controls, with the scalability and economic benefits of the cloud. ClearSky leverages what they call "Smart Tiered Caching" to keep hot data near the enterprise via a caching appliance, while offloading cold data to cloud providers. Combined with an intuitive web-based interface, this approach gives ClearSky customers a unique level of control over their data that neither on-premises nor cloud solutions can offer on their own.